Banks scramble to repair the damage caused by Crowdstrike IT outage

• Banks worldwide are fixing issues from a global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike update.
• British banks like Santander and Metro Bank faced ATM service disruptions on Friday.

Major banks worldwide are scrambling to fix issues resulting from a global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update.

British banks Santander and Metro Bank said they were impacted by Friday's outage, which affected their ATM services.

Santander said its support teams are "working hard to fix things as soon as possible," Metro Bank said customers "may experience a slowdown or temporary unavailability" with some of its products and services.

"Along with many other organizations, we have been affected by the reported global IT outage," Metro Bank told Business Insider.

"Currently we are having problems with our phone lines, which means customers may have trouble getting through. Customers can still transact via their app or online banking or visit us instore if they are close by."

Metro Bank added that its ATMs had been functional since around 9:30 a.m. BST (4:30 a.m. ET).

Commercial Bank of Qatar said that some of its services, such as mobile banking and its call center, experienced an outage, but all services are now fully restored.

According to the New Zealand Herald, some banking services in New Zealand were also disrupted, as was South Africa's Capitec, per Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Norway's central bank will carry out a banking system liquidity auction via phone and email, Bloomberg reported. Hundreds of outages related to Visa's services were reported on Down Detector.

Some social media users posted about being unable to access banking services, which they said highlighted the importance of cash. Gina Glaros, a reporter at NBC affiliate WTHR-TV, said in an X post that pumps at a Circle K gas station were not working, adding that it was only accepting cash as its card system was down.

CrowdStrike said in a statement shared with BI that the outage did not result from a cyberattack or security incident and that it had deployed a fix.

The cybersecurity firm added that it is "actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts" and that Mac and Linux hosts are unaffected.

However, some large organizations may face delays in resolving the issues and becoming fully operational again as the fix requires a manual reboot of computers, cybersecurity expert James Bore previously told BI. This could take significant time if an organization has many PCs.

Santander didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.