What caused Capitec’s total blackout

Capitec says its nationwide outage was the result of a global problem caused by cybersecurity platform provider Crowdstrike.

Crowdstrike confirmed the issue on Friday morning, saying a “content deployment” was responsible for sending Windows computers around the world into a dreaded Blue Screen of Death boot loop.

After several hours of downtime, Capitec announced on Friday morning that its banking services have been fully restored.

It apologised to its customers for any inconvenience and blamed the outage on a global outage resulting from a Crowdstrike deployment.

“Since early this morning, clients have faced difficulties accessing various banking services, including online banking, mobile app transactions, and card payments,” says Capitec.

“Our tech team has worked quickly to resolve the problem — we are pleased to report that all our banking has now been fully restored.”

It assures that its clients’ bank accounts and personal details are secure and unaffected by the incident.

“Client service remains our top priority, and we deeply regret the severe impact this disruption has had on your banking experience,” it added.

“We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused and appreciate your patience and understanding during this challenging time.”

Capitec customers reported wide-ranging issues with the bank’s services on Friday, 19 July 2024.

Outage tracking website Downdetector showed a significant surge in reports of issues with Capitec’s services from around 07:00 on the day, with most complaints relating to mobile banking, online banking, and ATM services.

Many customers took to social media to complain about declined transactions, unresponsive ATM services, and inability to access the mobile app.

Capitec acknowledged the nationwide issues while they were still ongoing. It apologised and said it was working to restore its services.

It also sent an SMS to some customers, informing them it was aware of the issues.

Windows users worldwide complained on Friday morning that their computers displayed the operating system’s Blue Screen of Death, with the error message pointing to a Crowdstrike system agent causing the problem.

Crowdstrike later confirmed the issue and provided a workaround for system administrators to recover impacted systems.

However, the workaround requires technicians to have physical access to machines and fix each one individually.

In addition to Capitec, the issues impacted airports, television news stations, other financial institutions, emergency services, and various other industries and companies globally.

Sky News in the UK, ABC in Australia, and the London Stock Exchange all experienced problems or outages as a result of the issue.

Reports of the widespread blue screen issues followed Microsoft’s resolution of a cloud services outage that impacted flight operations in the US on Thursday night.

It resolved the cloud services issue at around 07:00 SA time. At the same time, some users reported problems accessing Microsoft 365 cloud services.

Microsoft confirmed this on its cloud status page, saying users could experience problems accessing various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“A configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections,” it said.