Microsoft outage ‘could take weeks to repair as world might be sufferer of cyberattack’

It might be weeks until the Microsoft outage is fixed properly, while many people could be “vulnerable to cyberattacks”, according to tech experts.

The power outage that hit last night left thousands of people locked out of their banks while planes were grounded.

Users worldwide, from the UK to India, Australia and the US, reported encountering the Blue Screen of Death error messages across various sectors including banking institutions, supermarkets and media companies.

READ MORE: Global Microsoft IT outage LIVE as planes grounded and Sky News off air in blackout

There’s lots of quality news coming out of the US.

Now experts have warned there may be “no quick fix” to the global outage. Speaking exclusively to the Daily Star, virtualDCS’s CEO Richard May outlined some of his concerns in the wake of the blackout.

“From my perspective, Microsoft might be at fault here,” he said. “It seems Crowdstrike is blocking the operating system from starting. Without booting up, these machines can’t connect to the network, meaning they’ll all need manual fixes – potentially taking weeks.

“A major concern is that people might start disabling Crowdstrike to get their systems running, which could leave them vulnerable to cyberattacks. This situation might be exploited, creating significant risks.”

In a statement CrowdStrike’s President George Kurtz said the firm was “actively working with customers”, but virtualDCS’s CTO John Murray argued it still might be a while until the world sees a resolution.

“Although a workaround for this issue is known, the implementation of the fix in a typical environment requires local access to the keyboard of the affected machine,” said Murray. “This means lots of IT support floor walking, and hence a long time to resolution. We are expecting not hours of impact, but several days.”

Tech expert Dafydd Vaughan backed up the cyber attack fears. “Today’s IT outage shows that in our interconnected world, we are more and more vulnerable to cyber threats and errors,” said Vaughan, who is Chief Technology Officer at Public Digital and co-founder of the UK Government Digital Service.

He added: “This issue seems most likely to have been a mistake – a faulty update pushed out to hundreds of millions of computers around the world. Crowdstrike of course should have spotted this before it went live, but even with extensive testing it only requires a small percentage of systems to have issues with the update to cause widespread disruption.”

“Today’s crisis could have been avoided by companies rolling out computer updates on a few machines first to check they work, rather than sending them to all machines at the same time.”

The chaos began earlier this morning with delayed flights, cancelled trains flights while even Sky News was knocked off air due to severe IT issues. Ryanair was caught up in the drama, confirming that “third-party” IT problems are wreaking havoc on their services.

Supermarkets, banks and various businesses also experienced problems, with legions of IT pros heading to Reddit to share their stories of working non-stop to limit the damage.

In a statement, Microsoft said: “Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions. We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue. We’re working on rerouting impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion.”

Tech gurus are now bracing for what could be the biggest IT meltdown ever recorded. Aussie cyber-safety expert Troy Hunt took to X, hinting at the scale: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history.”

Many workers have taken the outage in stride, with one quipping on X: “Whoever’s responsible for the Microsoft outage is getting fired anyway, so the smart thing to do would be knock Teams out for the day too and leave a hero.”