Global IT outage proves cash is vital to society as CrowdStrike Microsoft incident hits card payments

Retailers were among businesses forced to accept cash only on Friday as a global technology outage crashed payment systems and blocked access to Microsoft services.

The culprit was a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike. An update to one of its pieces of software, Falcon Sensor, backfired, hitting computers running Windows.

According to BRC research, we are seeing a return to many of the pre-pandemic trends in payments, including smaller but more frequent purchases, and a slight return of cash payments.

Cards, however, now account for the overwhelming proportion of money being spent.

Eamon O’Hearn, GMB National Officer, commented: “The IT outage reinforces what GMB has been saying for years - cash is a vital part of how our communities operate.”

“When you take cash out of the system, it means people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics - even buying food. Today needs to be the start of a new conversation at a local and national level of how we keep cash in our society.”

Ron Delnevo, meanwhile, Chair of the UK Payment Choice Alliance and a high profile proponent of cash usage, took to social media to flag up a Telegraph article claiming that Waitrose and Waterstones had “returned to accepting cash” as a result of Friday’s events.

“Both businesses already accept cash. They never stopped, though Waitrose has too many “cashless” self check-outs,” he said.

The article also mentions GAIL’s Bakery which, Delnevo, noted is a different case.

“I wrote to their CEO Tom Molnar last year urging him to stop imposing “cashless”. He didn’t listen. Now everyone can see his folly. No doubt owners Bain Capital are monitoring this catastrophic failure in customer service - it’s their dough Tommy is losing.”

All apologies

George Kurtz, CrowdStrike Founder and CEO, has published the following statement online.

Valued customers and partners,

I want to sincerely apologise directly to all of you for today’s outage. All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority.

The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack.

We are working closely with impacted customers and partners to ensure that all systems are restored, so you can deliver the services your customers rely on.

CrowdStrike is operating normally, and this issue does not affect our Falcon platform systems. There is no impact to any protection if the Falcon sensor is installed. Falcon Complete and Falcon OverWatch services are not disrupted.

We will provide continuous updates through our Support Portal and via the CrowdStrike blog.

Please continue to visit these sites for the latest updates.

We have mobilised all of CrowdStrike to help you and your teams. If you have questions or need additional support, please reach out to your CrowdStrike representative or Technical Support.

We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this. I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives. Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates.

Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike.

As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.