On July 19th, there was a global cyber outage. This had an impact on airports, hospitals, banks and other essential services. Most of the technical problems were resolved, but the outage caused concerns for global authorities and companies, which are taking measures to ensure that this does not happen again.

Crowd Strike, a technology company, took responsibility for the incident. It offers services to other organizations, including a type of super-powerful antivirus that can also stop the invasion of hackers. When a CrowdStrike update had problems, it affected several computers that used the system.

In a press release, the company’s president, George Kurtz, said that the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, but an isolated problem. “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” he said. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he added.

A committee formed by members of the United States House of Representatives has called on Kurtz to testify. They want to know details about the defect and what is being done to stop it from happening again.

A blackout of this size mostly affects the economy. According to the data analysis company Anderson Economic, the shutdown caused global losses of more than one billion dollars, or about R$5.58 billion at the exchange rate at the time.

GLOSSARY

HACKER: a person who has extensive knowledge in computing who creates or modifies programs and applications (software). In general, hackers are hired to improve existing programs, develop new features or discover flaws that need to be fixed. Some, however, use their skills and knowledge to commit crimes, such as stealing personal data or hacking online bank accounts.

SOURCES: O GLOBO, G1, CNN BRASIL, ESTADÃO, NEXO, BBC, AND FOLHA DE S. PAULO.

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