"Microsoft Blue Screen" has spread across multiple countries, causing damage to the aviation industry, and CrowdStrike's update has become the catalyst for the stock price to rise sharply.
AInvestFriday, Jul 19, 2024 7:20 am ET
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Microsoft experienced a global outage on July 19 that not only caused a large number of flights to be grounded in the US, but also caused a global Windows "blue screen" crash, with Australia being one of the worst affected regions. The incident quickly became a global talking point, with "Microsoft blue screen" trending on social media platforms.

The outage first appeared in the US East on Thursday afternoon, with Frontier Airlines cancelling flights due to a significant technical issue with its system. Although the FAA lifted its ground stop order for Frontier on Thursday evening, the situation deteriorated further on Friday morning, with several other airlines, including American Airlines, Delta and United, cancelling flights due to communication issues. The resulting chain of events not only caused significant inconvenience for travelers, but also resulted in substantial economic losses for the airline industry.

Hong Kong International Airport's self-check-in kiosks were also affected, with airlines having to revert to manual check-in. In addition, Sky News, the London Stock Exchange, and banking systems in several countries were also affected.

In addition to the outage, Windows users in multiple regions of the world also experienced system crashes, with a "blue screen" appearing on many users' computer screens. Australia, in particular, was one of the worst affected regions, with many businesses and individuals affected, and the government intervening to investigate the cause of the large-scale network failure.

The Australian government has indicated that the outage may have been related to a problem with the update of global cybersecurity company Crowdstrike. According to analysis by several news outlets, the outage was caused by a failure of the Azure region in the US central data center, which resulted in Crowdstrike receiving incorrect configuration, and when Crowdstrike pushed the incorrect configuration to its global users, it resulted in the Windows blue screen.

Microsoft confirmed that most of the "blue screen" cases were happening on company computers that had third-party antivirus software installed, and that the issue was initially believed to be related to an update of the antivirus software. If changing the driver file name does not resolve the issue, users are advised to contact their IT department for further assistance.

Crowdstrike later confirmed on its support site that the issue was related to an update related to "content deployment," and that the company was working to roll back the update to fix the problem.

However, despite the efforts of both companies, at the time of publication, Crowdstrike's stock price had increased by 14.36% in pre-market trading, and Microsoft's stock price had fallen by 1.88% in pre-market trading, indicating a strong market reaction.

Microsoft has since confirmed that it has identified the root cause of the issue and announced that most services have been restored to normal.

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