The big question emerging from global IT outage as CrowdStrike bosses issue update on fix

The world awoke to computer chaos on Friday and according to experts, the global IT outage affecting millions today could take 'weeks' to be fully resolved. But one main question emerges - how did a simple system update cause so much disruption?

The widespread outage - which has been traced back to a US cybersecurity firm based in Texas - demonstrates the 'fragility' of Internet infrastructure worldwide, experts said.

It led to flights being cancelled and grounded, TV channels being forced off-air and GP surgeries being unable to book appointments or access patients records. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said a corrupted update file on Windows hosts was the cause of the meltdown, which has been described as the biggest IT outage the world has ever seen.

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The company, which provides security protection for cloud software including the Microsoft 365 platform, said the outage was not caused by a 'security incident or cyberattack'.

Experts said an update to CrowdStrike's Falcon anti-virus is likely to have caused the outage - Falcon is widely used software, as is Microsoft Windows. The cause, said the government after a series of Cobra meetings, appears to be a software error in the update.

The chief executive of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, said a fix had been deployed for a bug in an update rolled out by the firm which affected Microsoft Windows PCs, knocking many offline around the world.

Asked if he ever thought an outage of this scale was possible, he added: "Software is a very complex world and there’s a lot of interactions, and always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task." Mr Kurtz admitted that despite