CrowdStrike confirms Macs are 'not impacted' by a global outage impacting airlines, banks, and more — and a fix is on the way

Windows 11 on Mac with Parallels
(Image credit: Andrew Williams)

If you're waiting for an airplane or wondering why you can't log into your online banking, there's a good chance that CrowdStrike is to blame. The cybersecurity company pushed an update out early this morning that has caused untold problems the world over, but there's good news — your Mac is just fine.

Banks, airlines, airports, retailers, and a whole host of companies in numerous industries have reported a variety of issues over the last few hours as servers and services go offline thanks to a faulty CrowdStrike update that has caused Windows PCs to fail to restart correctly.

But in a post on the X social network, CrowdStrike president and CEO George Kurtz delivered some good news. He says that "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted," although that won't help you too much if a service or app you rely on happens to hook into a Microsoft server that is affected.

Safe and secure?

In the post on X, Kurtz said that the issue is not a security incident or a cyberattack, which is of course good news for everyone. He went on to add that "the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed." It will not be up to service management and technical teams around the world to implement the fix on their impacted servers in order to fully restore services.

People have taken to the internet to report canceled and delayed flights while some retailers are currently unable to process contactless payments as a result of the outage.

Apple fans will of course point out that those running Apple's old Xserve servers are unaffected by this issue, although we have to imagine that the number of those still in use is infinitesimal compared to those powered by Windows. The Xserve was discontinued back in 2011, and it definitely won't run macOS Sequoia when it is released this fall.

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Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.