The global outage linked to IT giant Microsoft has caused widespread disruption, affecting banks, airlines, train companies, and media organisations - with dramatic implications for the global insurance industry as businesses worldwide report significant disruptions.
In the UK, the outage led to Sky News going off the air on Friday morning. Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), which operates Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express, and Great Northern, along with TransPennine Express, issued alerts. Ryanair warned of “potential disruptions across the network,” and Edinburgh Airport reported longer waiting times due to the outage.
Crowdsourced website Downdetector indicated outages at several banks and telecom companies. The cyber outage is believed to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Speaking to Insurtech Insights, David D., President of Brokerage and Head of Insurance, Flow Specialty said: "CrowdStrike operates in more than 176 countries with the CrowdStrike Falcon reportedly processing more than 30 billion endpoint events daily worldwide. This could end up costing organisations billions of dollars in lost revenue collectively and already appears to be the largest IT outage in history."
Sid Mouncey, CEO of Blink Parametric, took to Linkedin to share reports, saying: "It’s times like these that real-time parametric solutions really deliver for customers of insurers and insurers claims teams alike."
The outage also caused shares of CrowdStrike to plunge 18% in premarket trading, while Microsoft stock dropped over 2%. The tech giant attributed the issue to a recent update of CrowdStrike’s Falcon software, which impacted its Windows platforms.
“We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state,” Microsoft said.
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