If you're waiting for an airplane or wondering why you can't log into your online banking, there's a good chance that CrowdStrike is to blame. The cybersecurity company pushed an update out early this morning that has caused untold problems the world over, but there's good news — your Mac is just fine.
Banks, airlines, airports, retailers, and a whole host of companies in numerous industries have reported a variety of issues over the last few hours as servers and services go offline thanks to a faulty CrowdStrike update that has caused Windows PCs to fail to restart correctly.
But in a post on the X social network, CrowdStrike president and CEO George Kurtz delivered some good news. He says that "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted," although that won't help you too much if a service or app you rely on happens to hook into a Microsoft server that is affected.
Safe and secure?
In the post on X, Kurtz said that the issue is not a security incident or a cyberattack, which is of course good news for everyone. He went on to add that "the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed." It will not be up to service management and technical teams around the world to implement the fix on their impacted servers in order to fully restore services.
People have taken to the internet to report canceled and delayed flights while some retailers are currently unable to process contactless payments as a result of the outage.
Apple fans will of course point out that those running Apple's old Xserve servers are unaffected by this issue, although we have to imagine that the number of those still in use is infinitesimal compared to those powered by Windows. The Xserve was discontinued back in 2011, and it definitely won't run macOS Sequoia when it is released this fall.
