MCIT monitoring local impact of CrowdStrike incident

Press Release/

Apia, 20 July, 2024 – Following the CrowdStrike incident affecting Microsoft software and applications that led to a global Information Technology outage, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology advises the public that it is closely monitoring this historic IT crisis.

The disruption caused by the software update is widespread and significant, with the effects being felt across multiple sectors including healthcare, media, finance, technology and local government. Samoa as one of the Microsoft users, there will likely be impacts in some operating systems except Linux and Apple.

This activity is not the result of a security incident or malicious cyber activity rather it’s an IT issue.

The Ministry strongly advises organizations for their IT staff to make sure they recover the system files of the computer as well as ensuring that there is always a backup storage for files and systems in times of digital crisis. We will continue to monitor the latest development of this incident and every responsive measure taken.

This incident has been reported to have affected major services globally on Friday, 19th July, 2024 and resulted into major global service disruptions. These outages of the majority of Microsoft services were a result of a CrowdStrike software update.

Whilst Microsoft have confirmed that several of their services experienced disruption across the night of 18th July, these issues have subsequently been resolved. The majority of the current disruption has been caused by a software update issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to its popular cyber security tool, Falcon.

The software update issues are only understood to affect Microsoft Windows devices, causing many to enter a crash and reboot cycle, hence the conflation of the two separate strands of activity.

CrowdStrike is reported to have issued a fix for the problem which should largely be successfully automatically, but some customer will require manual intervention. MCIT understands that a number malicious websites have released codes claiming to help customers recover from the outage. MCIT encourages all customers to source information from CrowdStrike sources only or Contact SamCert Team on email Samcert@mcit.gov.ws