IT problems will take ‘some time’ to fix, says Crowdstrike boss

Crowdstrike is one of the biggest and most trusted brands in cyber-security.

It has about 24,000 customers around the world and protects potentially hundreds of thousands of computers.

One struggling IT manager said the process to get computers back up and running is quick once an IT person is at the machine, but the problem is getting them to the machines.

The person, who wished to remain anonymous, is responsible for 4,000 computers in an education company and said his team were working flat out.

“We have managed to fix all of our servers using the command prompt as a workaround, but for many of our PCs, it’s not easy to do manually as we are spread out across five sites. Any PCs that are left switched on overnight are affected and we’re rebuilding them,” he said.

IT experts say this manual process will be particularly hard in large organisations with thousands of computers that are potentially under-resourced in IT.

Small and medium-sized businesses without dedicated IT teams or which outsource their IT issues might also struggle.

The larger, more resourced companies, like American Airlines, appear to be fixing the problems rapidly.

Interestingly it looks like many in the US might be less affected as computers that are potentially not yet switched on can be started up to download the corrected software instead of the bad version. But that might still involve a level of manual operation.

Mr Beaumont said that one of the world’s “highest impact IT incidents” was “caused by a cyber-security vendor”.