What We Know About the Global Microsoft Outage

Across the world, critical businesses and services including airlines, hospitals, train networks and TV stations, were disrupted on July 19 by a global tech outage affecting Microsoft users. A series of outages rippled across the globe as information displays, login systems and broadcasting networks went dark. The problem affecting the majority of services was caused by a flawed update by CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity firm, whose systems are intended to protect users from hackers. Everything from airlines to banks to retailers in many countries was hit. George Kurtz, the president and chief executive of CrowdStrike, said on Friday morning that “it could be some time for some systems” to recover.