20 July 2024 , 08:32
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On Friday morning, the world ground to a halt as an IT glitch caused by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike lead airline and bank systems to falter, causing widespread chaos
Workers across the world may have their salary payments delayed due to the chaos wrought by the Crowdstrike IT crash yesterday.
On Friday morning, banks and broadcasters across the globe suffered a catastrophic IT glitch, shutting down their services. Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm, was later identified as the source of the issues. Travellers were seen sleeping at airports as they awaited long-delayed flights, hospitals and GPs cancelled appointments, and some banking services were rendered non-functional.
The Texas-based firm has since issued an apology and rolled out a fix to address the issues, but its CEO has warned it could take some time before the situation is fully remedied. In an interview following an apology posted to his X account, George Kurtz said the firm is "deeply sorry" and added that CrowdStrike identified a "software bug" that "caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system".
Now, CEO of the Global Payroll Association Melanie Pizzey has revealed that "numerous clients" have contacted the association because they’ve "been unable to access their payroll software due to the Microsoft outage".
She added: "We could see a backlog with regard to processing payrolls for the coming month end which may delay employees from receiving their monthly wage."
“There’s a trade-off here between the speed of ensuring that systems get protected against new threats and the due diligence done to protect the system’s resilience and stop things like this incident from happening."
Air travellers faced massive delays as more than 4,000 flights were cancelled worldwide. In the UK, GPs were unable to book appointments, TV channels went off air and supermarkets and banks were hit with payment problems. Some passengers whose flights had been cancelled were told to stay away from airports due to overcrowding in terminals.
The outage was triggered by a bug in a cyber security update of Microsoft Windows. Security consultant Troy Hunt said: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it… This will be the largest IT outage in history.”
Experts are calling it the biggest IT outage in history. Millions of users around the world have been impacted. It extends from laptops to smartphones to whole computer systems – any connected to a corporate network. Customers of Microsoft’s cloud-based service Azure also reported issues.