Plus, the Nasdaq falls, as do shares of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind the outage. And New York’s financial regulator hires two new leaders for its crypto unit. Zoe Thomas hosts.
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[00:00:00] Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Friday, July 19. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. A single update from cybersecurity software maker CrowdStrike is causing massive outages for millions of users of Microsoft Windows devices. The outage swept the globe, touching almost every industry, including operations at banks,
[00:00:23] airlines and emergency services. The affected machines were unable to restart, instead showing a blue error screen. In a post on X, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that the issue had been identified and a fix had been deployed.
[00:00:38] He added the outage was not a security incident or cyber attack. In a status update seen by the WSJ, the company told customers its engineers had undone a software change that caused the problem. That clients would need to use a workaround to download a fix to affected devices.
[00:00:57] While U.S. financial markets were largely operating as normal today, stocks were impacted by the outage. The Nasdaq fell nearly 1 percent, CrowdStrike tumbled close to 11 percent and Microsoft shares lost less than 1 percent. CrowdStrike rivals, however, saw gains.
[00:01:16] And New York's financial regulator has appointed two new leaders for its cryptocurrency unit. Kenneth Coghill, a former official from Dubai's financial regulator and John Melikant, who most recently served as the chief legal officer at Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, joined the regulator's crypto unit, which has grown to 60 people.
[00:01:42] For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Monday's Tech News Briefing podcast.