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IT outage world wide issues

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Cyber security experts are warning of a second wave of disruption and harm that has started to come from cyber criminals hoping to capitalise on the chaos.

This morning Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the equivalent of the UK's GCHQ or the US's NSA, issued an alert about hackers sending out bogus software fixes claiming to be CrowdStrike.

"Alert! We understand a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover" the notice reads.

The agency is urging IT responders to only use CrowdStrike's website to source information and help.

The ASD warning follows calls from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) yesterday for people to be hyper vigilante of suspicious emails or calls that pretend to be CrowdStrike or Microsoft help.

"An increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed, as opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation," the agency said.

Ben King
Business reporter, BBC News

The worldwide flight disruptions continue today - and the airline data company Cirium has put some numbers on it.

As of 10:00 BST (09:00 GMT) 1,639 flights worldwide have been cancelled today, including 23 leaving the UK and 25 arriving.

Yesterday saw a total of 6,855 flights cancelled worldwide. That's 6.2% of all scheduled flights.

The UK had 207 departures and 201 arrivals cancelled.

To put it into context - July 18, the day before the outage, saw 1.8% of flights cancelled worldwide.

The chief executive of the Port of Dover is encouraging displaced airport passengers to use their ferry services.

The port said early today they were dealing with "hundreds of displaced" airport passengers.

Now the port's chief executive, Doug Bannister has told PA News Agency: "We operate a turn up and go system here. However, we do insist you have a [booking] on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down.

"The greater visibility we have the better.

"But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers 'come on down. We have the capacity'."

He added that the Port is expecting 10,000 cars today - a 2,000 increase on yesterday.

While most of the world was grappling with the blue screen of death yesterday, one country managed to escape the outage largely unscathed - China.

The reason is simple. China is not as reliant on Microsoft as the rest of the world. Domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers.

Over recent years, government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts like to call this parallel network the "splinternet".

This is partly a reflection of China's sophisticated tech landscape, but there's also a political dimension. In becoming "self-sufficient" when it comes to IT, Chinese authorities can also more easily control how citizens interact with technology.

It's also seen as a way of shoring up national security, in a similar vein to some western countries' banning of Huawei technology.

Reports of outages, when they did come, were mainly at foreign firms or organisations.

Tom Gerken
Technology reporter, BBC News

George Kurtz hasn't had a great couple of days.

The head of CrowdStrike has been on the apology circuit, popping up on TV and writing online to say sorry. He's now written a blog, again apologising and offering some advice.

"I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you," he wrote.

"All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation."

But he also took the opportunity to warn users caught in the outage to check who they're talking to online when being offered a solution.

"We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like these," he said.

"I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you're engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives. Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates."

The vast majority of people won't have known what CrowdStrike was before today.

They will now.

About 50,000 British travellers this morning are waking up where they didn't expect to be, the Independent's travel correspondent, Simon Calder, tells BBC Breakfast.

Asked what it was like in airports at the height of the issue yesterday, Calder says: "It was absolutely horrible".

He describes meeting some travellers at airports who were "absolutely despondent".

"This was going to be the busiest day for aviation in the UK for five years."

He underlines that while airlines and airports were affected in slightly different ways - some through online check-in, some with baggage systems for example - air traffic control remained fine throughout the issues.

It's now around 36 hours since we first started seeing blue screens of death pop up in alarming numbers. How's everybody getting on?

Many systems are now back online, although spare a thought for the world's IT departments this weekend who may not have got any sleep yet.

As the chaos diminishes, people are starting to ask some big questions. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, one of the UK's top computer scientists, compared what we've just been through to the pandemic this morning on the BBC's Today programme on Radio 4.

"By and large [these systems] are working to very high levels of quality," he said. "But when they do go wrong, and it's like a pandemic, what lessons do we draw as individuals?"

He said the immediate priority is "resilience" - otherwise known as having a Plan B.

"We should perhaps think about having multiple systems, not just depending on one now," he said.

The reason this outage caused such havoc is because of the millions of businesses, services and platforms around the world whose tech infrastructures run on the same products.

In the last 24 hours I've heard plenty of people say they intend to start carrying cash again, and are considering having more than one computer at home.

Quite how long this legacy will last remains to be seen, but it certainly seems to have got the world thinking about the fragility of digital life.

Simon Jones
Reporting from Heathrow

I've contacted several of the UK's main airports this morning, and they are all telling passengers the same thing: the IT problems have been resolved and the systems are up and running again.

That is the good news. The bad news is that with hundreds of flights cancelled yesterday, many planes and crew members will be in the wrong place.

And that means thousands of travellers won't be where they need to be. The advice is to check before you head to the airport.

The knock-on effects of this are being felt at the Port of Dover.

It says it's not suffering from any IT issues this morning, but it is seeing hundreds of people who were unable to fly yesterday coming to the port - many without ferry bookings.

That's going to make an already challenging day even more problematic.

In short - a global IT outage caused mass disruption across multiple industries including health services, banking, retail and airlines.

There are still many questions that have not yet been answered but here's a look at what we know as of this morning:

The outage was caused by an update pushed out by a US anti-virus company CrowdStrike

The company are now saying it has issued a fix but has caveated that it might take "some time" for all systems to be back running as normal

The outage caused thousands of flight cancellations and delays across the world

Banking, healthcare and payment systems were also affected

There is no suggestion that there was anything malicious about what happened or that there has been any compromise regarding data

We've got an eye out for any disruptions at airports this morning - we'll be bringing you more on that later

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz sent a letter to customers and partners. He apologised and said "nothing is more important" to him that the trust of customers and partners

Good morning and welcome to day two of our live coverage of the chaos caused by a faulty IT update.

Some knock-on delays and cancellations are still expected today as yesterday's travel chaos continues to reverberate.

CrowdStrike - the cybersecurity firm behind the faulty update - has issued a fix but has caveated that it might take "some time" for all systems to be back running as normal.

The outage also exposed the fragility of our tech infrastructure and, as the dust settles, people are starting to ask big questions.

Stay with us as we bring you the latest updates and analysis.

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IT outage live: Warnings mount that criminals seeking to exploit mass IT outage

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Businesses are slowly recovering after a massive IT meltdown as experts warn of a second wave of disruption.

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