Global Technology Outage: Crowdstrike Update Causes Unprecedented IT Failure Impacting Businesses Worldwide - Is Your Business Interruption Covered

The global technology outage that we saw on Friday 19 July 2024 caused significant disruption and interruption to businesses and organisations all around the world, impeding health care systems, grounding flights and crashing payment systems. The cause of what is widely believed to be the worst IT failure in history, initially reported as a Microsoft issue, originated from software provider Crowdstrike.

On 18 July 2024 Crowdstrike released an update to their Falcon Sensor, which detects and reacts to threats to systems, and it was this update which contained some ‘faulty code’, which led to users the world over experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (“BSoD”). This event caused widespread chaos despite Crowdstrike being able to identify, isolate and deploy a fix during the course of the same day.

The event was not a security incident or a cyber attack and so is unlikely to be covered under more traditional Cyber Insurance policies (which tend to require the influence of malicious activity) but it is certainly worth visiting your Commercial Insurance and Cyber Insurance policies to see if you have cover for your Business Interruption losses flowing from this event and indeed our Specialist Cyber Business Interruption team here at Harris Balcombe would be happy to discuss your situation and conduct a review of your policy to see if we can be of assistance. Please do get in touch or start your claim.