By Daily Mail Reporter
Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world slowed down or froze yesterday after an anti-virus program identified a normal Windows file as a threat.
Anti-virus vendor McAfee Inc confirmed that a software update had caused its anti-virus program for corporate customers to target the harmless file, leading PCs to repeatedly reboot themselves.
McAfee posted a replacement update and said in a statement: "We are not aware of significant impact on consumers."
But, judging by online postings, the number of computers affected was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.
Employee posts on Twitter showed that one victim of the big freeze was Intel Corp, although the firm did not make an official statement.
The computer problem forced about a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island to postpone elective surgeries and to stop treating patients without traumas in A&E.
In Kentucky, state police were told to shut down the computers in their patrol cars as technicians tried to fix the problem. The National Science Foundation headquarters in Virginia also lost computer access.
It's not uncommon for anti-virus programs to misidentify legitimate files as viruses. Last month, anti-virus software from Bitdefender locked up PCs running several different versions of Windows.
But Mike Rothman, president of computer security firm Securosis, said the scale of this outage was unusual, adding: "It looks to be a train wreck."
McAfee said the problem was confined to corporate customers, as consumer versions of its software seemed to be unaffected.
Peter Juvinall, systems administrator at Illinois State University, said that when the first computer started rebooting it quickly became evident that it was a major problem, affecting dozens of computers at the College of Business alone.
"I originally thought it was a virus," he said. When the tech support people concluded McAfee's update was to blame, they stopped further downloads of the faulty software update and started shuttling from computer to computer to get the machines working again.
In many offices around the world, personal attention to each PC from a technician appeared to be the only way to fix the problem. The recovery was slowed by the fact that PCs caught in a reboot cycle are not receptive to remote software updates. - Daily Mail