Major airlines, banks, and retailers are experiencing widespread disruptions linked to the outage after Microsoft reported problems with its online services, linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Many businesses have beenheld up by the “blue screen of death” on their Microsoft devices since early Friday morning, but it’s business as usual for Mac users, according to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
Major U.S. airlines have grounded flights and there are global delays. United, American and Delta have ordered a “global ground stop,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.
Microsoft said it had fixed the issue, but problems still persist and blue error screens are appearing on public screens across the U.S. and beyond. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella released a statement Friday afternoon, saying: “CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally.” Texas-based Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said the problem stemmed from a “defect found in a single content update for Windows.”
One reason Apple devices are exempt from this cybersecurity snafu is the “benefit of an Apple ecosystem,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives says. He told CNBC that “Everything is controlled within the four walls of Apple Park.”
Unlike Microsoft, Apple is less likely to work with third parties — like CrowdStrike — which leaves it “much less exposed on the enterprise,” according to Wedbush’s Ives.
Morningstar tech analyst William Kerwin told Business Insider that this sort of outage could’ve affected Mac users since CrowdStrike offers security on Macs “but the way the rollout happened, it got stopped before moving to that customer base.”
Most large enterprises run their servers off of Windows or Linux-based systems. While Apple does have an enterprise presence, it has seen more success selling Macs and other products that company workers use to complete work tasks vs. the underlying systems powering the companies’ servers. So when there’s a widespread enterprise IT issue like the Microsoft-Crowdstrike outage, the impact can be widely felt across the core infrastructure of major companies running their systems on Windows or Linux, which was the case with airlines in this instance, according to Business Insider.
