What you should know about today’s Microsoft outage.

It was frightening to wake up this morning to headlines about a widespread IT issue disrupting many industries, including airlines, banks, 911 call centers, and even the Paris Olympics. If you’re like us, you likely jumped to your computer to see if you’d been impacted.

You would already know if your business has been directly impacted but expect to run into delays dealing with vendors and other partners as they slowly navigate and recover from this issue.

Here’s what you should know:

• The issue is due to a recent update to a CrowdStrike cybersecurity application that caused Microsoft operating systems to crash. At the same time, Microsoft’s Azure backend environment is experiencing some backend issues causing disruption on a lesser scale to some Microsoft 365 services (Teams, OneDrive, etc.)
• CrowdStrike CEO released a statement confirming the issue “is not a security incident or cyberattack.” Rather, it is the result of a “defect” in a CrowdStrike update for Windows devices.
• Microsoft also released a statement that they’re “continuing to apply mitigation efforts” and are “progressing towards a full recovery.”

To make a long story short, both Microsoft and CrowdStrike are working on remediation. However, when the issues are this widespread, it takes time for all the fixes to apply everywhere they need to. If you’re experiencing issues, please be sure to engage your IT team.

While Innovative does not directly leverage CrowdStrike as a cybersecurity application, it’s possible you may experience some disruption due to the Microsoft Azure backend issues. Additionally, it’s possible that other service providers who integrate with your environment may leverage CrowdStrike in their systems, causing downstream issues. Innovative’s account managers are working to proactively reach out to all clients, but as always, if you’re experiencing any issues, please don’t hesitate to call the help desk at 301-739-7445.