Friday’s global Microsoft outage took some Cayman Islands government services offline, caused delays of some flights to and from the US, and shut down a number of retail bank ATMs, but, overall, the effect on the Cayman Islands was minimal compared to the impact worldwide.
Many government ministries and departments in Cayman were affected, including WORC, 911, the courts, and Customs and Border Control, but most were back online by the afternoon, with the government’s Computer Services Department working through each unit systematically.
The outage was caused by a flawed software update on Microsoft Windows platforms carried out by US cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike, which provides antivirus software to huge numbers of customers worldwide.
CrowdStrike: ‘Deeply sorry’
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, in an interview with NBC on Friday, said there had been a “negative interaction” between the defective update and Microsoft’s operating system, causing computer to crash.
In a statement on its website on Friday, CrowdStrike wrote: “We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on.”
Dan Fitton, general manager of TYME IT Solutions, part of the SALT Technology Group, explained that Cayman dodged a bullet with the global IT outage, in part because of the size of businesses on the islands.
“CrowdStrike is very widely used,” Fitton said, adding as an enterprise-type solutions provider, its suite of products tends to be used by larger organisations rather than smaller ones in part because of the expense involved in the products it offers.
Chamber of Commerce CEO Wil Pineau told the Compass on Friday afternoon that the chamber had not heard of any major impacts among its members locally.
Fitton said this was not surprising as the size of most companies in Cayman means they were likely not using CrowdStrike cybersecurity products.
He described CrowdStrike as “probably in the top three of the larger players” in the cybersecurity field.
The outage affected only Microsoft Windows environments, and Mac and Linux systems were not affected.
Fitton said the defective update had a “knock-on effect” on Windows operating systems.
He said the problem likely occurred because CrowdStrike did not test the effect its update would have – an error that would cost the company reputationally, and which on Friday knocked 12% off its value on the stock exchange.
Recovery plan
He said, apart from the impacts on services offered by government, which uses CrowdStrike’s anti-virus software, he was not aware of any major effects on other entities in Cayman.
Having a recovery plan is essential, Fitton said, for dealing with events like the fallout from IT impacts like this outage.
“The advice we give is to have a disaster recovery plan in place,” he said. “Disaster recovery doesn’t just have to be about hurricanes, they also apply to these types of events.”
Hiring a specialist company, like his own firm TYME, he said, can help a company to put a recovery plan in place and to enable them to get back to business when issues arise.
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