MICROSOFT GLOBAL CYBER OUTAGE AFFECTED SEVERAL PHILIPPINE COMPANIES

Thousands of passengers are stranded in different countries due to the global cyber outage, as well as online banking and telecommunications are not working. The Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) have done check-in manually.

Cebu Pacific notified passengers some technical issues have been experienced because of that; the manual processing caused delays. AirAsia suddenly rebooted the machines so there was a glitch in the check in and online app. At the online check-in at NAIA, there was a long line of passengers because the computers used to check in by the airlines went down.

Even the airport in another country is affected. At the Airport in Madrid Spain, the line of passengers also got longer. At Harry Reid International Airport in Nevada, flights are grounded. Some airports in India, passengers are also stranded and boarding passes are handwritten. The British News Channel Sky News wasn’t also able to air on television.

More than 20,000 subscription customers to CrowdStrike around the world are affected by the cyber outage (Photo courtesy of David Ryder/Getty Images)

Not only airlines are affected but also banks have notified their customers that they may experience difficulty accessing banking apps and is experiencing technical difficulties.

Some of the banks that’s affected are Banco de Oro (BDO), Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC), Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co. (Metrobank) and Union Bank of the Philippines also announced that its customers may not be able to access their online channels.

The communication line was also affected, in Australia the physical stores of Telstra, the largest mobile network in the country was closed. Check-out counters in some supermarkets are also closed.

All malfunctions in flights, media, banks, and telecommunications are due to Microsoft's global cyber outage. The outage is attributed to the sudden failure of the Microsoft system used by most companies around the world.

According to an expert, the global cyber outage took root when CrowdStrike released an update. It is an IT security platform that helps prevent cyber-attacks but the update also affected Microsoft's system around the world.

"Residual impact is still affecting some Microsoft 365 apps and services, and Microsoft 365 engineering are continuing to conduct additional mitigation actions to provide relief. We're continuing to observe an increase in functionality and availability for the remaining impacted scenarios and we're monitoring this closely to ensure we're progressing towards full recovery. Microsoft is continuing to treat this event with the highest possible priority,” the Microsoft stated.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in social media platform X, "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

CrowdStrike released information to fix affected systems, but experts said getting them back online would take time as it required manually weeding out the flawed code. Security experts said CrowdStrike's CRWD.O routine update apparently did not undergo adequate quality checks before it was deployed.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology continues to monitor the global cyber outage that affected companies in the Philippines, the DICT explained that the cyber outage was due to a failed update by the cyber security provider, so companies in the Philippines that use it were also affected.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer

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