The software outage had caused services to be paralyzed in multiple countries around the world.
On Friday, July 19, a major IT outage caused Windows services to go down for hours worldwide.
The issue was first reported to have happened in Australia, with operations of banks, telecommunications companies, and media establishments like the public broadcaster ABC impacted.
Later on, the BBC and Sky networks in the United Kingdom, and even the 911 emergency response hotline in the state of Alaska in the United States were reported to have experienced technical difficulties due to the said outage.
Several airlines around the world have also been forced to ground the planes or make adjustments to its flight schedules due to the software outage, led by Qantas, KLM, and European budget airline RyanAir.
In the Philippines, low-cost carriers (LCCs) Cebu Pacific and AirAsia have had to delay or cancel its flights in light of the situation.
Banking firms RCBC, Metrobank, and BPI also confirmed that their services were also affected by the fault.
Although, as of press time, the first two had already announced that the striken services are back up.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said that it is not using the cybersecurity software hit by the outage within the agency.
Albeit, the House of Representative says its site has become inaccessible due to the problem.
In a statement, George Kurtz, the President and CEO of cybersecurity software CrowdStrike, confirmed that the incident was a result of a certain defect in its update.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.”
The company has also added that the situation is neither “a security incident or cyberattack,” adding that “the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
CrowdStrike also advised customers to go to its support portal for the latest updates, and communicate with the company through their official channels.
For its part, Microsoft, which owns the Windows operating system, said that they have mobilized mitigating actions to improve their services.