• A number of banks, airlines, and other digital service providers are experiencing issues as part of a larger global cyber outage.
• Capitec Bank in South Africa has been most severely affected locally by the outage.
• While a number of reasons have been cited as the cause, it may be the result of a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

This morning we reported on Capitec Bank and its systems being unavailable nationwide as part of a massive outage. As it turns out, the local financial institutions not the only one experiencing problems, as a global cyber outage as it is being termed is impacting banks, airlines, and other digital services providers all over the world.

According to Reuters, several airlines in the United States were forced to ground planes and cancel flights as a result of “communication issues”. Similar problems befell banks in Australia, with UK broadcaster Sky News also being impacted by the global cyber outage.

Heading to the local version of DownDetector sees issues being reported by all of the major banks in South Africa, as well as network service providers, cloud hyperscalers, ISPs, streaming platforms, ecommerce websites, and more.

The reason for this global cyber outage, as reported by The Verge, is the result of a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike which is taken down affected PCs and servers.

While CrowdStrike is a name not known to many consumers and everyday people out there, it is a key element for many of the large enterprises and businesses we use the services of. In particular, the company provides the tools in managing the security of the Windows PCs and servers that businesses across the globe rely on.

CrowdStrike is aware of the issue, even going so far as to action a fix, but with most affected services still down, it does not appear to have worked at the time of writing. “We have widespread reports of BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) on Windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions,” a support note posted on its customer portal explained at 18:00 last night South African time.

With numerous online service providers and companies still struggling with connectivity, this global cyber outage remains a developing story.

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