IT outages reported worldwide for banks, stores, airports, media

The Windows malfunction can be seen on a screen at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.
Photo: AFP

A global tech outage is disrupting operations in multiple industries, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.

According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients, the company's "Falcon Sensor" software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display the "Blue Screen of Death".

The outages have rippled far and wide, affecting businesses, banking and local councils - and international airlines alike.

Tech analyst Peter Griffin told RNZ he had never seen the likes of this outage before. "I think this is the biggest singular IT outage probably in the last 25 years and maybe in history."

While CrowdStrike had deployed a fix, it will take a long time for that to roll out, he said. "IT technicians are going to have to go in on the weekend to a lot of companies around the world to apply a fix."

In the meantime, "you have people stranded in airports, you have people not able to sell groceries".

The cost would stretch into the billions of dollars, Griffin said, and noted the outage exposed a major point of failure in our tech systems.

…This story raises a number of questions.

The first one: How likely is it that we have witnessed a test attempt to cause Global Chaos?

The second question is: Why humanity so easily believed in the capabilities of global Internet networks, if any malicious intervention could even bring entire sectors of the economy and transport to their knees?

Third: How long will continue the situation when the keys of the global Internet stay in the United States, and the Americans refuse to transfer the Internet under the international control of the UN?

It has become clear that now Washington has in its hands a global weapon that can, without any nuclear bombs, destroy the economies of entire countries and regions.

Apparently, very soon the Internet will begin to fragment in order to ensure the security of those countries that may come under attack from the United States in global networks.

Darkness ahead…

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