CISA warns hackers exploiting Microsoft outage for phishing, as CEO Satya Nadella assures efforts to restore systems safely and globally are underway, reports Asian Lite News
US cybersecurity agency CISA has warned that hackers are trying to take advantage of Microsoft outage for phishing and other malicious activity, as the tech giant’s Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said they are working hard to safely bring systems back online globally.
The US cybersecurity agency warned individuals to “avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links,” which can lead to email compromise and other scams.
A passenger looks at the displays as there are delays in airline services caused by an ongoing global outage of Microsoft at Terminal 3 of Delhi Airport in New Delhi on Friday. (Photo: IANS/Anupam Gautam)
“Threat actors continue to use the widespread IT outage for phishing and other malicious activity. CISA urges organisations to ensure they have robust cybersecurity measures to protect their users, assets, and data against this activity,” it said in a statement
The outage has impacted Windows 10 and later systems, and is due to the “CrowdStrike Falcon content update and not to malicious cyber activity”.
Nadella said in a post on X that “We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”
Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.
All flights grounded across US after massive computer outage
Operations were being restored with departures resuming at many US airports, adding that the pause it had ordered was being lifted, reports Yashwant Raj
More than 5,000 flights were delayed in and out of the United States while over 800 were cancelled on Wednesday because of a computer outage in the Federal Aviation Administration’s ‘Notice to Air Missions’ system, which provides safety information to flight crews before take-off.
The FAA, which is the US aviation regulator like India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said that at around 9 a.m. (7:30 p.m. IST), operations were being restored with departures resuming at many US airports, adding that the pause it had ordered was being lifted.
The cause of the outage was not known till the writing of this report.
US President Joe Biden told reporters that he had asked the department of transport, which oversees aviation, to “report directly to me when they find out” the cause.
“They don’t know what the cause is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time,” he said.
The FAA ordered a pause on departures at around 7:00 a.m. (5:30 p.m. IST). Flights already airborne and those coming in to land were exempted.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said that 5,417 flights within, into, or out of the United States were delayed and 2,246 were cancelled.
An American Airline staff helps passengers check in at Ronald Regan National Washington Airport in Washington D.C. (Xinhua/Liu Shuai/IANS)
Industry experts said while operations were being restored, it will be several hours before they return to normalcy.
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the US following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted,” FAA said in an update on Twitter, adding, “We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem.”
These disruptions did not carry over into the defence sector, which operates its own system.
Lt. Col. Devin T. Robinson, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Washington Post that the defence department uses a different system than the one used by the FAA.
Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again….reports Asian Lite News
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users, including in India, on Monday evening, as they were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms.
“We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Andy Stone, Facebook communications executive said in a tweet.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
According to DownDetector, a website that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 per cent users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22 per cent had problems with the web version.
People took to Twitter to report the problems they were facing with Facebook family apps, including posting memes and GIFs.
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.
“All of us coming to Twitter to see if Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are really down,” a user tweeted.
“Everyone rushing to Twitter to see if WhatsApp is actually down,” another tweeted.
“Instagram down, Facebook down, WhatsApp down. You know who’s in-charge now?” another user posted.
Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again.
In April, Facebook and Instagram went down for millions of users for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant.
People took to DownDetector as they were welcomed with “sorry something went wrong” error message from Facebook and Instagram.
The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, famed developer Jane Wong noted in a tweet.
The issues were also affected the UK government websites as British citizens were unable to renew passports, apply for tax allowances, or obtain driving licence during the outage, reports Asian Lite Newsdesk
After a huge global web outage caused by a “service configuration” took popular websites, including leading news portals, off the grid on Tuesday, the services resumed for some websites although it was a slow process.
The technical glitch happened at the end of Fastly, a popular content delivery network (CDN) provider. The Cloud computing services provider said that the issue has been identified.
“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly said in an update.
“We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online,” a Fastly spokesperson was quoted as saying in media reports.
A CDN refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content.
Several popular websites were down, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times and many more.
“Error 503 Service Unavailable,” was the message that appeared on the affected websites earlier.
Some websites managed to find workarounds to the problem, with tech site The Verge taking to Google Docs to publish its news, but forgetting to limit those who could write on it, leading to a series of amusing edits and tweets.
Other popular websites affected were gov.uk, Quora, PayPal, Shopify and others.
The issues affected the UK government websites as British citizens were unable to renew passports, apply for tax allowances, or obtain driving licence during the outage.
The Guardian newspaper said its website and app were affected by a wider internet outage.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Pic Andrew Parsons No 10, Downing Street)
“Outages were reported in locations as varied as London, Texas and New Zealand,” the report noted.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman said the government was aware of the problems with accessing gov.uk. He also said reports that users were unable to book Covid-19 tests online were being investigated as a “matter of urgency”.
Asked if ministers believed a malicious foreign group or state was responsible, he said the outage “appears to be… affecting a number of sites globally, it doesn’t appear to be targeted at any one site”.
Last year, a problem with Cloudflare, another CDN company, led to a half-hour outage for most of the internet in major cities across Europe and the Americas.
The Cloudflare outage was eventually traced back to an error in a single physical link, connecting data centres in Newark and Chicago, that caused a cascading failure that knocked out almost 20 data centres worldwide, according to Guardian report.
Meanwhile, the sudden outage sparked many memes and jokes online, with hashtag #InternetShutdown, #InternetDown and #Error503 dominated trends on Twitter globally, the Indian Express reported.
From netizens to brands, all joined the bandwagon to find some solace amid many panicking it might be a “cyber attack”.
