Worldwide IT Outage Impacts Siemens, BMW, and Mercedes

In a recent article by the German publication MaschinenMarkt, the global manufacturing industry faces a critical challenge due to the widespread IT outage that occurred last Friday. Companies like Siemens, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz have been severely affected, leading to disruptions in production, supply chains, and operations.

A Worldwide Computer Failure

Software provider Crowdstrike conducted an update of its IT security software Falcon Sensor last Friday. Shortly after, operations at airports, banks, insurance companies, and automobile manufacturers nearly came to a standstill.

What is already described as the biggest IT failure affected Windows systems and impacted Microsoft customers. Microsoft stated on Saturday in a blog post that 8.5 million devices were globally affected:

“On July 18, CrowdStrike, an independent cybersecurity company, released a software update that began impacting IT systems globally. Although this was not a Microsoft incident, given it impacts our ecosystem, we want to provide an update on the steps we’ve taken with CrowdStrike and others to remediate and support our customers. (…) We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices or less than one percent of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”

The return to normalcy continued on Sunday and Monday.

Industry Leaders Impacted

Among the Microsoft customers affected by the global outage are industry leaders including Siemens, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, as reported by the German publication MaschinenMarkt.

Siemens has encountered significant disruptions, affecting its factories, logistics, and communication systems. Partially, these affected systems are already running again. Employees are still having difficulties in logging in to their computers, specifically Windows logins.

Similarly, automakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz have grappled with production delays, quality control issues, and supply chain bottlenecks. The disruption at BMW was resolved quickly and factories worldwide were able to resume operations. Similar statements have come from Mercedes in Stuttgart, where the company’s own IT service provider is now stabilizing the situation again.