On Friday, a CrowdStrike software glitch severely disrupted cloud-based software operations globally, crippling everything from airline travel to hospitals for hours. Fortunately, radio escaped many of the headaches endured by other industries.
The disruption, notably impacting Microsoft Windows applications, was felt acutely across North America but originated in Europe during the mid-morning hours. The situation was not due to a cyberattack.
Of radio’s largest broadcasters, iHeartMedia, Cumulus, and Townsquare Media all confirmed to Streamline Publishing that they were not affected. Only Audacy reported some disruptions across its stations. An Audacy representative said, “We did experience issues as a result of today’s outages. All of our stations were back up and running by 8 AM Eastern.” They did not elaborate any further on the number of stations that were compromised, or to what extent.
Nielsen was also briefly affected, with normal operations returning within hours.
FEMA’s IPAWS system was fully operational for the duration, with the nationwide Emergency Alert System remaining on-line.
Broadcast television stations did not escape as relatively unscathed as radio. Radio Ink‘s sister publication RBR+TVBR noted Sinclair, Hearst Television, and The E.W. Scripps Co. stations all had difficulties of varying degrees throughout Friday.
Meanwhile, the federal government is investigating the systems failure, as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency works with federal, state, and private partners to assess the impacts of the outage. They also issued warnings about potential exploitation of the incident by malicious actors, highlighting the broader security implications of the disruption.
The incident is being referred to as a wake-up call for the cybersecurity industry to reevaluate and possibly revamp their update procedures and overall system architectures to include more robust testing and fail-safes.
