A flawed kernel driver developed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has caused a massive outage at Microsoft and is now causing chaos worldwide; Windows machines are crippled by blue screens of death (BSOD) on a global scale The situation is so severe that airplanes are missing The situation is so severe that flights have been canceled, major banks are experiencing system problems, and major emergency 911 services have been affected Here is what we know about this online catastrophe

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The problem was first reported by an Australian company and followed by news that some Australian banks and broadcasters were unable to boot Windows PCs and laptops Only hours later, it became clear that this widespread online outage was not limited to Australia, with European companies across many industries encountering the same driver error Reports of this problem on a large scale quickly trickled in from the US and China as well [The online outage was triggered when CrowdStrike tried to push through a flawed driver update, leading to a BSOD pandemic of virtually unprecedented scale

This is one of the most serious IT failures to ever occur, and it is currently unclear how long the damage will last; CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the driver failure was “not a security incident or cyber attack ” and attempts to allay fears about X He said that the company is ”working hard to identify the cause of the failure He also said that the fault behind the error has been identified and a fix is currently being rolled out

Meanwhile, SpaceX and X CEO Elon Musk has called the CrowdStrike error “the biggest failure in IT history”

With the release of a corrected version by CrowdStrike (based in Austin, Texas), many users and businesses are hoping to get their systems back online quickly However, according to the Wall Street Journal, some businesses may be affected by this driver failure for several weeks

Simo Kohonen, who founded the Finish Network company Defused, stated that “the fixes offered by CrowdStrike are fairly manual and in some cases may be difficult to deploy on a large scale”

The massive online outage has already taken a heavy toll on CrowdStrike, with the 2011-founded company's stock price down nearly 14% and Microsoft's down 24%

The ongoing disruption caused by kernel driver errors is noteworthy