Authorities in the United Arab Emirates issued a warning on Friday, warning users of Crowdstrike software to be cautious of any software updates, amid worldwide outages that affected banks and major airlines.
The UAE’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority stated in a post, “We inform you that there is a technical defect in the Crowdstrike software update that may affect the electronic systems of the institutions that use it.”
It is recommended that users wait to download or execute any updates until the issue has been fixed.
According to sources, one of the servers had a Windows vulnerability, which the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike acknowledged.
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Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity technology company with headquarters in the US that provides services to global large institutions.
The government of Australia acknowledged that the outages experienced by banks, telecommunications providers, and the media were likely caused by a Crowdstrike.
When Reuters phoned Crowdstrike’s technical assistance on Friday, the company played a recorded phone message informing them of reports of crashes on Microsoft Windows that were related to their Falcon sensor, although it did not identify Australia.
According to a post on X, the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator, Michelle McGuinness, stated that there was no evidence indicating the outage was caused by a cyber security incident.
The outages had a widespread impact. Ryanair, the largest airline in Europe based on passenger volume, alerted travelers to possible disruptions that could affect “all airlines operating across the network,” though it did not elaborate on the specific nature of the disruptions. Spain reported a “computer incident” at all of its airports.
“Investigating reports of connectivity issues to Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS,” the cloud service provider AWS stated in a statement.
It was not immediately apparent if Crowdstrike-related issues were the cause of all reported outages or if there were other factors at work.