Businesses worldwide grappled with an ongoing major IT outage Friday, as financial services and doctors' offices were disrupted, while some TV broadcasters went offline. Air travel has been hit particularly hard, with planes grounded, services delayed and airports issuing advice to passengers.
The outage came as cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike experienced a major disruption early Friday following an issue with a recent tech update.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has since said that the company is "actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," stressing that Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.
"This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," he said on social media.
One expert suggested it may be the "largest IT outage in history."
Separately, Microsoft
cloud services were restored after an outage, the company said on Friday, even as many users continued to report issues.
Shares of CrowdStrike closed down 11%.
FTC Chair Lina Khan connects outage to competition and 'fragile systems'
FTC Chair Lina Khan weighed in on the ongoing CrowdStrike outage in a series of posts on X on Friday. Without mentioning CrowdStrike or Microsoft, she appeared to blame the outage on concentrated market power, which creates "fragile systems," she wrote.
"Concentrating production can concentrate risk, so that a single natural disaster or disruption has cascading effects," Khan wrote in the series of posts.
Khan did not announce an FTC investigation of the incident, but she linked to unrelated past actions she has taken, including opening up a query on cloud computing companies, and seeking public comment on companies that frequently buy smaller competitors, like in the technology industry.