If you couldn’t fly, buy tickets, withdraw money, watch the news or do your shopping this morning, you’re not alone. A massive global computer outage affecting countless businesses and services has grounded flights for United, Delta and American Airlines, delayed ticket sales for British soccer team Manchester United and taken down Sky News. The reason? A Windows update.
According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, “a flaw discovered in a single content update for Windows hosts” released Friday morning wreaked havoc on computers around the world and caused the dreaded Blue Screen of Death to appear on all clients connected to the host, rendering the machines incapable of functioning.
It’s worth noting that Mac customers have not been affected by the issue, which has been “identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed,” though it may be a while before things are working normally again, as affected PCs are sent to recovery mode and cannot reboot. A workaround from CrowdStrike Engineering has been posted on Reddit , but it needs to be applied on every machine. And since Crowdstrike posted it behind a login page, many users likely won’t be able to find it.
Meanwhile, somewhere, Apple’s marketing team is working on a new ad.
