“The outage could potentially have widespread knock-on effects for global food supply chains and deliveries,” Nicola Thomas director of the UK Food and Drink Exporters Association told Food Manufacture.
“For example, reported flight delays and airport IT system issues may impact airfreight shipments, particularly of fresh and perishable foodstuffs, in turn limiting product availability and increasing spoilage.”
So far, aviation analytics firm Cirium has reported that more than 1,000 flights globally have been cancelled.
International ports have also been impacted by the issues, including Poland’s largest container terminal, the Baltic Hub in Gdansk.
“Delayed and out-of-position containers are never good, as many people will remember from the global shortages created by the Suez Canal blockage caused by the ship ‘Ever Given’ back in 2021,” added Parcelhero’s head of consumer research, David Jinks.
The UK has also seen delays and cancellations in its rail services, with Avanti West Coast, Great Western Railway and Southern among the major operators reporting problems.
“Freight trains have to be threaded between passenger services and so are likely to face disruption,” Jinks explained.
A few retailers are also reported to have experienced payment problems as a result of the outage, including Morrisons, and bakery and coffee shop chain, Gails.
The American cybersecurity company behind the outage said it is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, while reassuring that it's “not a security incident or cyberattack”.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” a statement from Crowdstrike read.
Mac and Linux hosts are said not to be impacted.
Commenting further, Jinks said: “It’s believed that a Crowdstrike update caused a BSOD loop on some Windows machines, meaning they repeatedly booted and crashed. The problem was that many systems updated automatically overnight.
“Crowdstrike is reported to have rolled back the update and the company stated on Friday [19 July 2024] morning that ‘a fix has been deployed’. However, it could be some time before its impact has been resolved on all systems, as IT staff may need to physically access individual machines to boot them into safe mode and remove the update file.”
Crowdstrike has said its “team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers” and recommends organisations communicate with CrowdStrike representatives “through official channels”.
“Time will tell the extent of disruption to international trade and industry caused by the global IT issue," Jinks concluded, whilst cautioning that it could well be significant.
In other news, Fairfields Farm invests more than £2m into Wormingford factory.
