According to media reports, on Friday 19 July 2024 a defective CrowdStrike Holdings (CRWD) update led to a widespread IT outage, impacting all businesses from airlines and railways to media agencies, tech firms and financial institutions.
Global IT Outage Grounds Stocks Across The Board
Indexes around the world felt the sting of this glitch and signed off last week’s trading on a low. This included the London Stock Exchange (LSE), France’s CAC 40, Germany’s DAX, Spain’s IBEX, the Netherlands’ AEX, Switzerland’s SMI and Sweden’s OMX Stockholm 30. Based on Sky News data, the FTSE dropped by more than 0.6% and the pan-European STOXX 600 decreased by 0.72%.
Minimal downtrends were, however, detected in the stock movements of CrowdStrike and Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), the two companies in the eye of this storm. CRWD stock was down 11.10% and MSFT down 0.74% when the final bell rang on Friday.
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Analysts said that while CrowdStrike has addressed the update issues, it does not make up for the financial and logistical damage caused. CNN claimed that the relevant CrowdStrike software runs at the roots of systems and repairing the software and hardware is a monumental task.
Apart from fixing the computers themselves, the servers driving them were reportedly stuck in a continuous crashing and restarting loop. Experts said that this crisis also extended to remote computers running without human intercession.
The CEO and founder of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, stated that the fault impacted “a single content for Windows hosts”. He added:
Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.
