Worldwide Outage: CrowdStrike Update and Microsoft Services Disruption

Companies around the world are reporting issues that appear to be caused by a bad update to a CrowdStrike product. The company stated that it is investigating reports coming from all over the world that affect Windows environments.

CrowdStrike is rolling back the changes, and the issue seems to be related to an update for the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor. The solution involves logging in to Safe Mode and deleting a specific CrowdStrike component.

In a statement, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz explained, "this is not a security incident or cyberattack" and that the issue has been "identified, isolated, and a fix has been released."

According to an official source at Microsoft, the company is "aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update to a third-party software platform" and that the company "is expecting a resolution soon."

On Microsoft's official status page for Redmond technology, it is noted that "users may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 services and applications." Microsoft also notes that affected services include Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 admin center, and Microsoft Purview, but are not limited to these.

"We continue to work on reducing the number of affected Microsoft 365 applications and services. While addressing the remaining impact, we expect users to see the fix soon," writes Microsoft.

According to internal telemetry, Microsoft mentions that some issues such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Windows 365 may be revealed, although it also states that a few services have already been recovered.

Microsoft notes that the identified root cause is "a configuration change in a part of our Azure backend workloads, which caused interruptions between storage and compute resources and led to connection errors affecting downstream Microsoft 365 services connected to these links."

Regarding the service disruptions at Microsoft, an official source from the company said, "we are aware of an issue affecting a number of customers. We are aware of the impact on customers and continue to work to restore services to their previous state as quickly as possible for those still experiencing outages."

This issue is being felt worldwide. For example, US airlines ordered landings due to communication issues.

The news was updated at 11:30 with information about the headline change, along with CrowdStrike's statement and Microsoft's response.

Source: CrowdStrike Resolving the Global Service Issue (itsecurity.pt)