Tesla Production Lines ‘Shut Down’ By Global IT Outage

Electric vehicle maker Tesla reportedly shut down some of its production lines on Friday morning due to widespread outages caused by an update linked to CrowdStrike security software.

Not every production line was affected, Business Insider reported, citing three unnamed sources.

The firm sent some factory workers home during the night shift at its Austin, Texas and Sparks, Nevada facilities after some machinery began displaying error messages due to the outage, the report said.

Tesla sent staff a notice on Friday saying the company had been affected by a “Windows Host Outage” causing issues with servers, laptops and manufacturing devices, the report said.

“Users are seeing a blue screen on their devices,” the memo said.

Widespread disruption

Some production lines at the Austin facility remained in operation on Friday morning, the report said.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

“This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain,” Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said in reply to a post by Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella about the outage.

CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz publicly apologised on Friday for the outage, which caused problems at major banks, media outlets, airlines and countless businesses.

The IT chaos triggered crisis meetings by government officials around the world, and in the US alone caused 1,200 flights to be cancelled, disrupted some 911 services and impacted the operation of street lights.

In other countries as well the incident disrupted critical infrastructure, financial trading systems, medical booking systems and media broadcasts, with some calling it the largest-ever IT failure.

Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been resolved.

Falcon update

CrowdStrike said the outage was caused by an update to its Falcon tool, which identifies unusual behaviour and vulnerabilities to protect computer systems from threats such as malware.

The affected Windows PCs and servers were knocked offline, and forced into a recovery boot loop which saw machines unable to restart properly.

“We’ve completed our mitigation actions and our telemetry indicates all previously impacted Microsoft 365 apps and services have recovered,” Microsoft said in a statement on X.

“We’re entering a period of monitoring to ensure impact is fully resolved. For more information, see MO821132 within the admin center.”

CrowdStrike’s Kurtz said a fix had been deployed but that some customers would require manual updates, which would take more time to implement.