I can just see it now....

Lol, pretty much @Seymourbutts

:D

One of the key risks with owning Cybersecurity firms is playing out…at least it is not a cyber attack, but amazing how much of an impact it has had.

Ironically, I have owned CRWD for years now, and only found the stomach to top up yesterday, so perfect timing. Luckily it was a small top up, so I can live with it.

Very widespread as well.

Luckily my work computer was not affected.

Will be looking into crowdstrike more closely

What’s going on? I wonder what’s behind all of this?…

Same here. The servers we manage seem to have escaped unscathed. Not a Crowdstrike customer, but obviously deep in bed with Microsoft like most corporations.

https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-crowdstrike-outage-australia-internet-banks-media-0a5f792b6571b37a35181d64028fefc4

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said Friday that an issue that has caused major disruptions to companies worldwide is not a security incident or cyberattack.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on social media platform X that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

He said: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world on Friday.

Escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.

The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines including American Airlines and Delta.

News outlets in Australia reported that airlines, telecommunications providers and banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Airlines in the U.K., Europe and India reported problems and some New Zealand banks said they were offline.

Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment. It did not explain the cause of the outage further.

New Zealand’s acting prime minister, David Seymour, said on X that officials in the country were “moving at pace to understand the potential impacts” of the global problem.

“I have not currently received any reporting to indicate these issues are related to malicious cyber security activity,” Seymour wrote. The issue was causing “inconvenience” for the public and businesses, he added.

Israel’s Cyber Directorate that it was among the places affected by the global outages, attributing them to a problem with the cybersecurity platform Crowdstrike. The outage also hit the country’s post offices and hospitals, according to the ministries of communication and health.

Meanwhile, major disruptions reported by airlines and airports grew.

In the U.S., the FAA said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded. Travelers at Los Angeles International Airport slept on a jetway floor, using backpacks and other luggage for pillows, due to a delayed United flight to Dulles International Airport early on Friday.

Airlines, railways and television stations in the United Kingdom were being disrupted by the computer issues. The budget airline Ryanair, train operators TransPennine Express and Govia Thameslink Railway, as well as broadcaster Sky News are among those affected.

“We’re currently experiencing disruption across the network due to a global third party IT outage which is out of our control,’’ Ryanair said. “We advise all passengers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their scheduled departure time.”

Edinburgh Airport said the system outage meant waiting times were longer than usual. London’s Stansted Airport said some airline check-in services were being completed manually, but flights were still operating.

Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where lines grew and some passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled. Passengers in Melbourne queued for more than an hour to check in, although flights were still operating.

Airline operations in India were disrupted, affecting thousands.

The privately-owned IndiGo airlines told the passengers on X that the Microsoft outage on Friday impacted airline operations in India, inconveniencing thousands of passengers.

Several airlines made statements on X saying that they were following manual check-in and boarding processes and warned of delays due to technical problems.

Hong Kong’s Airport Authority said in a statement that the outage was affecting some airlines at the city’s airport and they had switched to manual check-in.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport said on its website that the outage was having a “major impact on flights” to and from the busy European hub. The outage came on one of the busiest days of the year for the airport, at the start of many people’s summer vacations.

In Germany, Berlin Airport said Friday morning that “due to a technical fault, there will be delays in check-in.” It said that flights were suspended until 10 a.m. (0800GMT), without giving details, German news agency dpa reported.

Zurich Airport, the busiest in Switzerland, suspended landings on Friday morning but said flights headed there that were already in the air were still allowed to land. It said that several airlines, handling agents and other companies at the airport were affected, and that check-in had to be done manually in some cases, but that the airport’s own systems were running.

At Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport, some US-bound flights had posted delays, while others were unaffected.

Australia appeared to be severely affected by the issue. Outages reported on the site DownDetector included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra.

Hospitals in Britain and Germany also reported problems.

Several practices within the National Health Service in England reported that the outage had hit their clinical computer system that contains medical records and is used for scheduling.

“We have no access to patient clinical records so are unable to book appointments or provide information,” Church Lane Surgery in Brighouse in Northern England said on the social media platform X. “This is a national problem and is being worked on as a high priority.”

The NHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In northern Germany, the Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital, which has branches in Kiel and Luebeck, said it had canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, but patient and emergency care were unaffected.

News outlets in Australia — including the ABC and Sky News — were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels, and reported sudden shutdowns of Windows-based computers. Some news anchors broadcast live online from dark offices, in front of computers showing “blue screens of death.”

In South Africa, at least one major bank said it was experiencing “nationwide service disruptions” as customers reported they were unable to make payments using their bank cards at grocery stores and gas stations.

The New Zealand banks ASB and Kiwibank said their services were down.

An X user posted a screenshot of an alert from the company Crowdstrike that said the company was aware of “reports of crashes on Windows hosts” related to its Falcon Sensor platform. The alert was posted on a password-protected Crowdstrike site and could not be verified. Crowdstrike did not respond to a request for comment.

--- end of excerpt ---

Source: https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-crowdstrike-outage-australia-internet-banks-media-0a5f792b6571b37a35181d64028fefc4

I wonder if incidents like these will be used in future as ammunition by competition authorities globally to clip the wings of the tech giants?

("Break up Coles and Woollies" on steroids)

My 20-year old daughter over dinner tonight, having been unable to do any work at her part time office job from mid-afternoon:

"Dad, is it just that Y2K came a bit later than everyone was expecting". (Straight face)

They'd want to get this fixed before Monday:

That's a sample of the US companies slated to report this coming week. Imagine having to go to their individual websites to read the reports instead of having them all available on the stock exchange or broker websites? Oh, the horror!!

Crowdstrike only fell by 11%. Pre-market was 20%

Not really a bargain considering it is $74 bn.

But used on so many devices right now when you look at the impact of the outage.

I was silly enough to top up on GTK when the airports were getting crippled by the bug (they have the software for airports). I assume there will be downstream effects on lots of other businesses.

Don't think it's an easy task when you need to boot in safe mode to fix

I think it will all be forgotten in a month or so, and as @edgescape point's out, probably not worth buying the dip on crowdstrike.

This is classic IT/ICT life. No one notices you and your effect for 99.9999999% of the time, but that one time a patch/update fails... well, don't people suddendly take interest in the CIO (and department).

Remember the great Optus outage a few years ago? All the rage and now forgotten, and there have been other national IT outages...that I can't remember.

Critical businesses tend to maintain manual processes anyway, hence most airports kept operating as one example, just at a pre-IT pace of work (anyone remember that?)

Also, I'd be greatful that it was a deliberate update error, verse malicious code. One is easy to fix and maintain trust, the other, not so simple to find and fix.

Finally, and jokingly, these events are like modern power/blackouts. Good for population-growth, if you know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge. Not a lot else to do while we wait for the internet to work again.

I wouldn't think so @mikebrisy

At a local customer-of-crwdstk business level, this kind of IT issue should be accounted for in Disaster Recovery and Cyber Incident processes.

At a global/higher level, I don't see the value proposition. Multiple application/device providers is what exists now. The scale these larger companies are at is its own positive within the internet ecosystem.

Outages like this, perhaps are the means for CIOs of governments and corporations to pay closer attention to outage/downtime policies in contracts etc though...

I would expect the shares to be volatile, at least until there is more commentary on the potential fallout from management in the next quarterly earnings report.

High valuation + bad news = underwhelming performance.

Good to see the Crowdstrike-caused outage is last week's news now. Here's this coming week's US company report release schedule - for the biggest companies at least:

[Source: MarcusToday Saturday email]

Thursday (Aug 1) will be a big one. Including Apple, Amazon, Intel... all after market (for those 3), so the market will react to those on Friday, so Friday night our time.

Have a look at the concentration of Energy companies reporting on their Thursday and Friday.

Wednesday will be the second busiest day, with Mastercard before market, and Meta (FB) and Ebay after the market closes.

Again, these are mostly half year reports for the yanks because their financial year is usually the calendar year, so ends December 31, Not June 30.

And here is the US Results Season calendar from MarcusToday:

[Source: MarcusToday Saturday email]

The pink ones are the largest tech (IT companies) - NVIDIA isn't included because it has a different calendar year - NVIDIA will host a conference call on Wednesday, August 28 to discuss its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, which ended July 28, 2024 for them - so they're not in line with the rest of the US market. The companies above highlighted in blue are the US' largest 6 banks.

That one is of the US' largest companies only, and we're already down to the bottom line, which is clearly a lot LESS busy than the previous couple of weeks.

Here's the calendar they included today for Australia:

Clearly doesn't cover ALL of our ASX-listed companies, but it does cover most of the decent sized ones. As with most of these calendars, there are a few in there that are based on when in the month they reported last year, so are not confirmed - it's a guide only. With most ASX50 companies they do advertise their reporting dates, usually either via an ASX announcement or else they provide a link to their "corporate calendar" in the Investors' section of their website. Example: https://www.monadelphous.com.au/investors/investor-calendar/ confirms that MND will be reporting on Tuesday 20th August, as listed above.

During this coming week, CAT is slated to report on Tuesday, and on Friday they have REA and NCK reporting. NCK do usually get their numbers out relatively early in the month, unlike TPG and DOW (Downer EDI) who wait until the very last allowable day. Interesting that most of the big miners are all reporting in the last week of August along with Coles, Woolworths, Wesfarmers, Ramsay Health Care, Qantas, Webjet, Flight Centre, and a few that many SM memebers either hold or follow, like Lovisa and Nanosonics.

Again, the US financial year tends to end on December 31 for most companies, so the majority of the US reports are interim (half year) reports, and the majority of the Aussie companies are reporting for their full year.

Finally, here's one more table from today's MT newsletter (link above) that includes a few things that may impact market sentiment this week, mostly the lower half of this table:

[Source: MarcusToday Saturday email]

Thanks for this. Just to clarify, CAT are having their AGM this week rather than reporting any results.