Millions of workers are at risk of missing paychecks this month amid a global power outage that could last for weeks.
Several of the largest banks in the United States saw their systems crash this morning, preventing users from accessing their accounts or receiving or sending money.
TD Bank and Bank of America remained down in the millions this afternoon, but TD said its systems have been restored while customers are still complaining on Downdetector that they can’t use the banking systems.
The Global Payroll Association (GPA) has warned that people “risk losing their pay” because their employers or banks rely on CrowdStrike for cyber protection.
The global outage of the Crowdstrike service has prevented millions of workers from receiving their paychecks after banking systems went down on Friday
It’s not yet clear how widespread the payroll outage is, but Melanie Pizzey, founder and chief executive of GPA, said her firm had received complaints from several clients who were unable to access their payroll software because of the outage.
Typically, payroll systems must be notified of any issues that may prevent direct deposits from being made at least two days before payday so that the issue can be resolved in a timely manner.
“Depending on the length of this disruption, it could have very serious implications for businesses across the country, particularly those that process payroll on a weekly basis,” Pizzey said. saying.
‘In addition, we could see a delay in processing payrolls by the end of the month, which could delay employees receiving their monthly salary.’
George Kurtz, the chief executive of the software company whose bug caused the problems, said it could be weeks before systems are up and running again.
Meanwhile, issues with Visa and Zelle are keeping people from making or receiving payments, and there is no estimated timeline for when they will be available again.
The outage began with Microsoft, leading many people to believe the company’s systems were failing, but within hours, Crowdstrike admitted that an update to its “Falcon Sensor,” which scans for viruses and malicious attacks, was to blame.
TD Bank, Visa, Zelle and Bank of America have all been affected and technology market analyst Dan Ives told DailyMail.com that the global outage “will take 24-36 hours to fully control”.
People took to social media to complain about the impact of the outage on financial implications, with one person writing on X: “Still no direct deposit. The global IT outage, coupled with the fact that TD is now the worst bank out of Canada’s Big Five, means it might be a bit of a stretch.”
Another person wrote: “My company was not affected by the IT outage, but our payroll software was. Happy Friday.”
A Bank of America customer wrote in Fall detector who were unable to deposit a check at a local branch at 11:30 a.m.
The customer said that when she returned five hours later, the money was “still not available” and there was no record that the check had been deposited.
TD Bank issued a statement at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, 12 hours after the outage began, informing customers that many of its affected systems have been restored but warned that they could still experience service delays and longer wait times.
The Crowdstrike service outage affected Microsoft 365 Apps and Azure service used by more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies and eight major financial institutions in 43 U.S. states.
Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses protect against cyber threats and keep information from shared files, email messages, and links secure and private.
Its Defender for Office application helps prevent, detect, and respond to phishing and ransomware threats.
Azure is a cloud-based firewall security service that provides threat protection for files, data, and other applications.
The software glitch grounded planes, disrupted 911 call centers and caused government agencies like the Social Security Administration to close for the day.
Crowdstrike has assured its customers that the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity attack, but tech market analyst Dan Ives told DailyMail.com that the global outage is “an epic disaster” and “will take 24-36 hours to fully control.”