Cyber outage

Today's cyber outage could be "largest in history," cybersecurity expert says

From CNN’s Louis Mian, Sean Lyngaas, Rob North and Hira Humayun

The global cyber outage that caused disruptions to airlines, businesses and emergency services on Friday could be the “largest IT outage in history,” according to cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt.

“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Hunt said in a post on X on Friday.

“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” he added.

Other recent large outages:

• It remains to be seen whether the scale and impact of the outage will reach the level of the “NotPetya” cyberattack in 2017, which the Kremlin was widely considered to have been behind. The 2017 attack initially targeted computers in Ukraine but affected companies globally. The White House upbraided Russia for “the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history.” 
• There was another mass internet outage in 2021 across the world, following a bad software update by Fastly, a company which runs a content delivery network of servers and data centers.
• In January 2023, a computer outage at the US Federal Aviation Administration caused thousands of canceled or delayed flights but did not directly affect other sectors. The FAA said at the time that they had traced the fault “to a damaged database file” and that there was “no evidence of a cyberattack.”
• Last month, a systems outage at software provider CDK Global, which the company says was caused by a cyberattack, resulted in chaos at car dealerships in the US, making it difficult for it to track customer interactions, orders and sales. Sources told CNN that CDK Global appeared to have paid a $25 million ransom to the hackers in order for the outage to end.