By Staff Writer
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology,MCIT, is being forced to scramble quick online advise to local Microsoft users, of a global Information Technology outage that could affect them.
The urgent warning is over a ‘…CrowdStrike incident affecting Microsoft software and applications’
The MCIT urgent online advisory assured local online users it is closely monitoring the historic IT crisis.
“Samoa as one of the Microsoft users will likely have impacts in some operating systems except Linux and Apple,” MCIT explained.
“This activity is not the result of a security incident or malicious cyber activity rather it’s an IT issue.
“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.”
The Ministry is strongly advising organizations with IT staff to make sure they recover the system files off the computer and ensure there is always a backup storage for files and systems.
“We will continue to monitor the latest development of this incident and every responsive measure taken.”
The incident is reported to have affected major services globally on Friday, 19th July, 2024 with 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 software update issues are reportedly for users of Microsoft Windows devices only.