The nightmare of a global IT collapse is once again manifesting itself, against the backdrop of the crash - one of the most serious and widespread ever recorded - that has hit digital systems across half the world in the last few hours.
Sending into total or partial halt vital parts of collective existence - from air traffic to markets, from trains to banks, from the media to some medical services in various countries - across the various continents. This time there seems to be no room for the suspicion of some kind of cyber-attack.
The chaos is in fact attributable to technical problems involving Microsoft, the American digital giant linked to the name of Bill Gates, and in particular to an antivirus program released by a supplier company. The repercussions of which have generated a pervasive global chain reaction that has spread, starting from Thursday evening and continuing for a good part of today, in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
At the origin of everything, it seems, there was a double catastrophic trigger: the first concerning Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's home cloud; the second a wrong anti-viral update released by a partner security company, Crowdstrike, capable of destabilizing millions of PCs containing Microsoft technology. Diagnosis certified among other things by the sudden blackout of the screens in numerous airports, a sort of paralysis known to experts with the lugubrious name of Blue Screen of Death syndrome. The specter of a hacker blitz was instead quickly set aside: even by the surveillance bodies of various countries, starting with France. Until the first signs of recovery bounced back in the afternoon, in a context infected in any case by a tail of deadly disservices whose consequences will take time to be fully disposed of and reabsorbed.
"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a flaw in a single content update for Windows hosts," wrote George Kurtz, CEO of the company that is currently in even more of a turmoil than Microsoft, on X. "Mac and Linux are not affected," he then clarified, confirming that, based on the information currently available, "this was not a security incident or cyberattack" but rather "an issue that was identified in the interim, isolated" and for which "a fix" was finally released.
Kurtz himself later apologized publicly in an interview with NBC in which he said he was "deeply sorry." The damage, however, was felt for hours and hours. Heavily. Among the worst and most visible effects were those found on flights: with airports like Berlin even forced to temporarily close completely, and others plagued by technical problems, mass cancellations, delays and inconveniences for myriads of passengers from Amsterdam to Zurich, from Singapore to Hong Kong to Sydney. Or in any case hit like a domino by queues related to the problems of others (for example in the British airports of London, in various airports in France outside Paris, or in Italy).
In the US, meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially preferred to impose a precautionary stop on all flights, grounded regardless of destination, before announcing the gradual resumption of operations accompanied by a message of apology to passengers. While some airlines (such as the Turkish giant Turkish Airlines) found themselves grappling with specific setbacks to their IT systems against the backdrop of a global wave of troubles that - at least in the airline sector - seems to have spared China, according to Beijing. The evil avalanche did not stop there. In the United Kingdom, one of the most crippled sectors was the train sector, with the island's main railway operator blocked for several hours. And something similar was seen in Poland.
While on the financial front, the London and Milan stock exchanges had to, among other things, freeze the update of their respective indices before restarting towards normality in the afternoon.
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