Breaking - Global IT outage grounds planes, closes banks, and disrupts services everywhere

A global outage is currently causing havoc, grounding planes, grinding public transportation systems to a halt, disrupting banking services, and affecting everything from streaming services to supermarkets. The cause is the dreaded Windows 'Blue Screen of Death' or BSOD, bringing down systems that countless people, businesses, and critical services rely on.

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Based on reports, the culprit appears to be a CrowdStrike update for its CrowdStrike Falcon threat checker, which is currently causing systems to crash and fail.

This is one of the most significant outages we've seen in a while, it's gotten to the point where airlines like American Airlines, United, and Delta have stopped flights taking off. Emergency services are also apparently down in some areas.

To make matters worse, affected machines are continually restarting in a boot loop. In Australia, there have been reports of people in supermarkets being affected by the outage. Every POS (Point of Sale) system has crashed, leaving customers unable to pay for groceries.

Due to the time difference, much of the early reporting on the outage has come from countries like Australia, where it's 'peak time' on Friday. If this is the first time you've heard about CrowdStrike, here's a quick primer. CrowdStrike is a computer security firm based in the U.S. that offers endpoint security. As such, its tools are embedded into systems, monitoring all traffic.

This sort of failure, a security update causing millions of systems to crash and affecting banks, airlines, emergency services, hospitals, supermarkets, and more, is alarming. As the situation is still unfolding, stay tuned for updates. And if you're affected by the outage, please let us know your experience.