This all started when I was trying to pay for my groceries at New World. Both my credit cards were declined, as was my Eftpos PayWave, but swiping my Eftpos card worked.

Yesterday, a major IT glitch impacted CrowdStrike, a prominent cybersecurity firm, affecting numerous global services, including airlines, healthcare, and financial sectors. This incident, caused by a faulty software update for Windows systems (CrowdStrike on Mac and Linux had no issues), led to widespread disruptions.

Key Points:

Impact on New Zealand:

• Minimal critical service disruption.
• Some travel delays, but no significant long-term issues.
• Government departments and banks reported no major losses.
• Woolworths, Foodstuffs, St John Ambulance, ANZ, Kiwibank, BNZ, Chemist Warehouse were among the big NZ companies affected.

Government Response:

• National Emergency Management Agency was on alert.
• Quick assessment ensured continuity of essential services.
• Ongoing analysis to understand the full impact and prevent future occurrences.

CrowdStrike’s Apology:

• CEO George Kurtz issued a public apology and confirmed no security breaches.
• Emphasized the importance of vigilance against potential exploitation by adversaries.

Future Considerations:

• Questions raised about the global dependency on single cybersecurity providers.
• Discussions on redundancy and the management of software updates are anticipated.

Conclusion

While the CrowdStrike outage highlighted vulnerabilities in our interconnected world, this will happen again at some point with a different vendor, This was the largest IT outage in history so far , and at the time of posting, CrowdStrike’s share price was down 20%.

You can find Crowdstrikes statement here