Asia-Pacific faces fallout from CrowdStrike outage: ‘It will continue to happen’

While its impact on the region was limited, analysts said the incident highlights the need for backup systems and business contingency plans

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The CrowdStrike offices in Sunnyvale, California. In what will go down as the most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen, a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed countless Microsoft Windows computer systems globally. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 12:00pm, 26 Jul 2024Updated: 6:59pm, 26 Jul 2024

The CrowdStrike outage, which shut down government and corporate IT systems across the globe, caused significant chaos across Asia-Pacific last week and raised many still unresolved questions about its financial fallout and liability issues.

However, insurers and IT experts said the outages’ impact on the region was limited and would not lead to an overhaul of cybersecurity protocols, although they recommended businesses strengthen their backup systems and continuity plans in case similar incidents strike again in the future.

The incident unfolded on July 19, just as businesses in Asia-Pacific were winding down for the evening. First, customers of major Australian and New Zealand banks could not access their accounts. The rest of the region followed an hour later, with processing systems at airports in Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Japan all going down and numerous airlines cancelling or delaying their flights.

In Malaysia, train booking system were disrupted as were some ATMs, television broadcasting, postal and retail services and websites.

Speculation of a malicious cyberattack quickly died down after the true culprit behind the chaos was revealed to be a software update from CrowdStrike, a global leader in cybersecurity technology, that was pushed to their Falcon platform, which is designed to stop system breaches using cloud technology.

The update caused a glitch that crashed nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices. Affected computers bore the frighteningly-named “blue screen of death”, displayed when Windows systems experience a critical error.

In Asia-Pacific, where CrowdStrike is not as commonly used as other security software, the damage caused by the outage appears to have generally been limited. A few countries like Thailand were spared from the upheaval, with no reported impact on critical systems like telecommunication networks or government infrastructure.