People stand near the blacked-out digital billboards at Times Square following a global IT outage, in New York City, US, on July 19, 2024.Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were coming back online on Friday after a mistake in a security software update sparked hours-long global computer systems outages, another incident highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.
"We're deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company," Kurtz told NBC News. The scale of the outage was massive, but not yet quantifiable because it involved only systems that were running CrowdStrike software, said Ann Johnson, who heads Microsoft's security and compliance business.
"This event is a reminder of how complex and intertwined our global computing systems are and how vulnerable they are," said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson.