You may have woken up on this morning and wondered why your direct deposit didn't clear or why all the flights are delayed. Well a global outage of some Microsoft services is to blame and it isn't just banks and planes that are down. Turns out most businesses that utilizes Microsoft Cloud or Business are down for the count and that includes a lot of critical services.
So what happened? An outsourced security company called CrowdStrike is to blame. Most updates go off without a hitch in the middle of the night. They are done in the middle of the night so that if things go sideways, they can fix it. However, that clearly didn't help this time. A severely bugged update crashed the entire system and has been a difficult patch to revert. No, it is not a cyber security attack as many thought it might be, just a faulty update that sent everything in to chaos.
BSOD or "Blue Screen of Death" is a common phase in the IT world of that icky screen that comes up when your system crashes. It is an error that is dreaded by technicians as it is usually a critical failure. This is what has popped up for affected businesses & users and it really does cause a panic! If you do not have Microsoft business and a BSOD appears, please bring in your unit as it may have crashed for real. If you have Microsoft Business, you may just have the bug.
If you have noticed that you are having trouble with making payments online or in-store or accessing your online banking, this is also very likely to be related to this outage. Emergency and medical services are also affected so please do be cautious today! In short, please be understanding with the world around you if something computer related is going wrong. We depend on technology to work and if something goes down, it affects us all. Usually, it is not nearly as widespread and a full critical failure as today has been, so let's hope that Microsoft and CrowdStrike are able to resolve this swiftly.
We intend to update this as we know more.
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