Microsoft global outage: The takeaways

Microsoft’s worldwide computer failure on July 19, 2024 is reminiscent of the oft-feared but never realized Y2K bug. At the time, doomsday predictions predicted the shutdown of computers, elevators, and all web-dependent systems, but these catastrophic scenarios never materialized. 24 years on, while Microsoft’s “crash” has indeed raised concerns, it highlights the global dependence on a single player and the risks associated with a quasi-monopoly.

Fortunately, the impact was relatively limited, even if some essential sectors such as aviation, hospitals, banking, and certain stock markets were disrupted in some countries. Among the first sectors to be affected worldwide were aviation and stock markets. The latter fell last Friday in Europe and Asia, following a widespread fall in US equities, exacerbated by the global computer breakdown. Travel and communications were also impacted, causing flight delays and cancellations.

Numerous airports such as Zurich, Berlin, Amsterdam-Schipol, and all those in Spain were affected, while several airlines reported problems: the Americans Delta and American Airlines, Air France, Ireland’s Ryanair, as well as three Indian airlines, among others. The computer breakdown led to delays in recording before traffic resumed in part by mid-morning. In Morocco, the impact on strategic sectors was minimal, especially in key sectors such as aviation and healthcare. Apart from the surprise outage, which caused some delays for tour operators (Amadeus system blocked), banks and other organizations were not affected, as most have their own IT systems.

“ This computer failure, as Covid has shown, reveals the extent to which our world has become a global village. It underlines the importance of anticipating possible breakdowns and taking the necessary measures to deal with them”, concluded Othman Chérif Alami, President of the CRT Casablanca-Settat.
Here is a quick overview.

National Defense recommendations

THE Moroccan General Directorate for Information Systems Security (DGSSI) is keeping a close eye on the situation. Following Microsoft’s worldwide outage, which stems from the update of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity solution that equips many Windows-based devices, the DGSSI is urging users to exercise extreme caution. It points out that this problem affects system stability and consequently all regular operations. Accordingly, maCERT (the Center for monitoring, detection and response to computer attacks) recommends:
-to identify the affected systems using CrowdStrike Falcon on Windows systems.
-to delay CrowdStrike updates until the problem has been resolved.
– to restore the system to a previous restore point if possible.
– to always test updates in a test environment before applying them to the production environment.
-to always make backups of your system so that you can restore it in the event of similar problems.
It is also important to report incidents and service disruptions to the DGSSI, along with the measures taken as a result.

Radia LAHLOU