Mayor Adams and top New York City officials said emergency services, hospitals, traffic lights, water systems, public transportation and other key functions are running after a massive overnight cyber disaster triggered inadvertently by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
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An update the firm sent to clients around the world was corrupted, freezing many systems and computers running Microsoft Windows. And it’s truly nuts, but chief executive George Kurtz acknowledged that many computer systems and work stations impacted will need to be rebooted manually.
“Let me let me start with I want to personally apologize to every organization, every group and every person who has been impacted by this. And we understand the gravity of the situation,” he told CNBC.
NYC officials at a press conference today said schools are open and school buses running, although systems to track them may be disrupted. Ditto with subways – they’re going but online schedules can’t be accessed. Citi Bikes weren’t working, noted CNBC anchor David Faber, who said he uses one to get to work.
There are glitches in NYPD’s arrest booking systems, and it may not be possible to pay city bills or to apply for various permits online. The Mayor said the priority has been insuring critical services. He predicted “a cascading effect” from the outage throughout Friday, calling this “a developing situation.”
Airlines and airports were heavily hit with huge crowds staring at blank monitors. Delta earlier today grounded all flights around the world. As Deadline reported earlier, Sky News and other international broadcasters suffered outages on Friday morning amid what may be the most dramatic global tech meltdown ever.
City officials said hospitals are open and patients should not put off care. However, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is delaying some procedures due to the outage. “At this time, we are pausing the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia. We are in the process of calling patients with appointments that are affected. If you have not been notified, please proceed to your scheduled appointment,” its website said.
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The city’s Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser explained that “the Windows systems panicked” when served with CrowdStrike’s corrupted update file. He said such security updates, or patches, are sent frequently, sometimes multiple times a day, to make sure customer systems are protected from malicious actors.
“The thing with technologies like this is, in order to be safe and be able to respond to threats that evolve on a continuous basis, you need tools that are capable of being updated in that way. As a result, a tool like CrowdStrike, which gets updated in real time when they push a patch, if that patch goes wrong this is a perfect example of how bad that can be.” (CrowdStrike is also the name of the software.)
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers to anyone affected by this,” Kurtz said on Today .
“We know what the issue is, we’re resolving and have resolved the issue. Now it’s recovering systems that are out there. Essentially … the system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused a an issue with the Microsoft operating system. And we identified this very quickly and remediated the issue. And as systems come back online, as they’re rebooted, they’re coming up and they’re working. And now we are working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online.”
He said that “When you look at software, it is a is a very complex world. And there’s a lot of interactions, and always staying ahead of the adversaries is certainly, you know, a tall task. So these sorts of things, obviously, you know, you try to understand and mitigate them. And in some cases, you have a weird interaction. And it didn’t seem like it happened on every Windows system. There’s different versions and flavors and patch levels, if you will, and we’re just trying to sort out where the, that negative interaction was. And again, that’s what we’re focused on getting customers back up and running.”
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