By Pascal Ibe

Claim

An X user JC Okechukwu claimed that the operational failure in Western countries’airports and financial institutions was as a results of cyber attack

Verdict

Thks is Misleading.
A major outage in Microsoft’s cloud services on Friday (July 19) hit businesses across the world, from airlines and financial services to media groups and healthcare..

Full Text

An X user named JC Okechukwu on Friday claimed that the operational failure in Western countries’airports and financial institutions was as a results of cyber attack.

In a post on Friday on X, Okechukwu wrote, “BREAKING: CYBER ATTACK HITS OPERATING SYSTEMS IN THE WEST

“Reportedly, the entire Western world has been hit by a massive cyber attack.

“London Stock Exchange reports technical glitches

“Spain reports computer incidents at all its airports

“Berlin Airport announces the suspension of all flights

“Major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta and United ground all flights

“Many more countries in Europe are reporting disruptions and more Americans airlines are getting grounded at the moment on account of technical glitches. “

The post by the X user gamered over 4.5k views with many reactions and comments as at Friday afternoon.

According to news reports, airlines’ operations in countries like Singapore, the United States and Australia have been disrupted due to a major global cyber outage affecting services.

The massive information technology (IT) outage, which began in the early hours of today, also affected banks and media outlets.

According to international media, several airports and airlines have reported issues with their IT systems, as outages spread.

Flights have been said to be grounded at Sydney airport, United Airlines has stopped flying, while the London Stock Exchange Group’s platform is reportedly experiencing outages.

Verification

A comprehensive report by the India Express indicated that a major outage in Microsoft’s cloud services on Friday (July 19) has hit businesses across the world, from airlines and financial services to media groups and healthcare.

Microsoft has announced that it has identified the cause behind the outage, and that a majority of services were recovered. However, several customers are reportedly still facing issues with various Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, still down.

Based on what Microsoft has revealed, the outage which prevented users from accessing several Microsoft 365 apps was due to a ‘Configuration change’. According to Microsoft’s Service Health Status page, this configuration change in a section of their Azure backend workloads was causing interruption between storage and compute resources. This rendered several apps from Microsoft 365 apps unusable.

Another potential reason, as suggested by several news reports, is a cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike which produces anti-virus software. The reports claim that a software update from the company went wrong, and was blocking Windows devices, essentially prompting the “blue screen of death” on PCs.

According to a report by The Sydney Morning Herald, “The outage was caused by a fault in the “Falcon sensor” used by US-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. The sensor is installed on many business computers to gather security data. The fault had a major impact on Microsoft systems worldwide.

“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon sensor,” the company said in a statement.

Conclusion

Claim by an X user that the entire Western world has been hit by a massive cyber attack is Misleading.

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