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The Travel Show

Join the Travel Show team on a journey of discovery as they explore new destinations around the globe and uncover hidden sides to some of the world’s favourite vacation hotspots. Encounter unique people, places and cultures and experience stunning landscapes, bustling cities and incredible adventures in the planet’s most fascinating locales.

Watch The Travel Show and more acclaimed documentaries on BBC Select today. Restrictions apply*.

The Travel Show on BBC Select

Episode 1: Germany The German rail network offers fascinating delights from war bunkers to amazing monorails.

The German people have a love affair with trains. Emeline Nsingi Nkosi explores the fascinating German rail network in this travel documentary. She heads into Berlin’s underground U-Bahn system to visit the disused war bunkers, attends the opening of a museum dedicated to Wuppertal’s distinctive monorail and rides a makeshift narrow-gauge train that links the remote Hallig Islands to the mainland.

Episode 2: UK Sailing One London school is breaking down barriers in what’s perceived as a traditionally elitist sport.

Greig City Academy has gained a reputation for turning out elite sailors and transforming the lives of their students through their unique sailing program. This travel documentary reveals how one group of teenagers try to keep on top of their studies as they battle the high seas.

Episode 3: Seattle Qasa Alom heads to Northwest America and discovers its cultural connections to nature.

The Pacific Northwest is an area of outstanding natural beauty with a fascinating and historic traditional culture. Journalist Qasa Alom travels to Seattle and witnesses the unique and energetic fish market, goes on a whale watching tour to hear how whale sightings have rebounded, heads underground where regular flooding has reshaped the city and visits Seattle’s famous Space Needle.

Episode 4: Alaska Qasa Alom hunts for gold and lives off-grid as he travels through the Alaskan wilderness.

Journalist Qasa Alom continues his journey in America’s Northwest and discovers some of the ways in which Alaska has been shaped by nature. He discovers the challenges for the state capital posed by the Mendenhall glacier, prospects for gold, hears about the deep connection the indigenous people have with the land and spends time with a father and son living off-grid in the Alaskan wilderness.

Episode 5: Cabo Verde An exploration of Cape Verde, a breathtaking group of islands off West Africa’s coast.

Cape Verde, an archipelago of islands off the coast of West Africa, has become a popular vacation destination thanks to its year-round sunshine. While most tourists don’t venture far from their hotels, Lucy Hedges discovers stunning landscapes and an intriguing mix of African, Portuguese and Brazilian cultures that await travellers who are prepared to venture beyond the beaches.

Episode 6: Sri Lanka 1 A journey through Sri Lanka exploring life and culture from the coasts to its cities.

Rajan Datar journeys through Sri Lanka, exploring local life and culture from the western coasts to its northernmost city. Rajan joins a project that’s on a mission to future-proof coastal communities by replanting coral. In Colombo he gets a guided tour from celebrity actor Nimmi Harasgama and then travels to Yala National Park and comes face to face with some of Sri Lanka’s most iconic wildlife.

Episode 7: Sri Lanka 2 Rajan Datar tries white water rafting and heads north to meet a team clearing landmines.

Journalist Rajan Datar continues his adventure around the wondrous nation of Sri Lanka in this enlightening travel documentary. He travels to Kitulgala, a town on the banks of one of the country’s longest rivers, to try white water rafting. Rajan also heads north to Jaffna to meet the team clearing the landmines left behind following the country’s long and bitter civil war.

Episode 8: Slovenia Why is access to skiing considered a fundamental right by Slovenia’s government?

Eva Zu Beck heads to the majestic and under-explored Slovenian mountains in Central Europe. She finds out why access to skiing is seen as a fundamental right by the country’s government. She then boards a military helicopter tasked with supplying mountaineers at the country’s remote refuges and puts her constructions kills to the test in a snow-castle building competition in Carpathia.

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Chaos and Confusion: Tech Outage Causes Disruptions Worldwide

Airlines, hospitals and people’s computers were affected after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, sent out a flawed software update.

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By Adam Satariano ,  Paul Mozur ,  Kate Conger and Sheera Frenkel

• July 19, 2024

Airlines grounded flights. Operators of 911 lines could not respond to emergencies. Hospitals canceled surgeries. Retailers closed for the day. And the actions all traced back to a batch of bad computer code.

A flawed software update sent out by a little-known cybersecurity company caused chaos and disruption around the world on Friday. The company, CrowdStrike , based in Austin, Texas, makes software used by multinational corporations, government agencies and scores of other organizations to protect against hackers and online intruders.

But when CrowdStrike sent its update on Thursday to its customers that run Microsoft Windows software, computers began to crash.

The fallout, which was immediate and inescapable, highlighted the brittleness of global technology infrastructure. The world has become reliant on Microsoft and a handful of cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike. So when a single flawed piece of software is released over the internet, it can almost instantly damage countless companies and organizations that depend on the technology as part of everyday business.

“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of Britain’s National Cyber Security Center and a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

A cyberattack did not cause the widespread outage, but the effects on Friday showed how devastating the damage can be when a main artery of the global technology system is disrupted. It raised broader questions about CrowdStrike’s testing processes and what repercussions such software firms should face when flaws in their code cause major disruptions.

How a Software Update Crashed Computers Around the World

Here’s a visual explanation for how a faulty software update crippled machines.

While outages are common, often caused by technical errors or cyberattacks, the scale of what unfolded on Friday was unparalleled.

“This is historic,” said Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at WithSecure, a cybersecurity company. “We haven’t had an incident like this.”

George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, said that the company took responsibility for the mistake and that a software fix had been released. He warned that it could be some time before tech systems returned to normal.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” he said in an interview on Friday on NBC’s “Today” show.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, blamed CrowdStrike and said the company was working to help customers “bring their systems back online.” Apple and Linux machines were not affected by the CrowdStrike software update.

A White House official said the administration was in “regular contact” with CrowdStrike and had convened agencies to assess the impact of the outage on the federal government’s operations.

CrowdStrike, founded in 2011 by Mr. Kurtz and others, has built a reputation over the years as a firm that could solve even the toughest security problems. It was tapped to investigate a 2014 hack of Sony Pictures and the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, which exposed Hillary Clinton’s emails.

But problems stemming from CrowdStrike’s products have surfaced before. In April, the company pushed a software update to customers running the Linux system that crashed computers, according to an internal CrowdStrike report sent to customers about the incident, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The bug, which did not appear to be related to Friday’s outage, took CrowdStrike nearly five days to fix, the report said. CrowdStrike promised to improve its testing process going forward, according to the report.

On Thursday, the tech issues began when Microsoft dealt with an outage on its cloud service system, Azure, which affected some airlines .

Then CrowdStrike sent an update for its software called Falcon Sensor , which scans a computer for intrusions and signs of hacking. If everything had gone according to plan, CrowdStrike’s software would have received minor improvements and customers would have hardly noticed.

Instead, when CrowdStrike’s faulty update reached computers running Microsoft Windows, it caused the machines to shut down and then endlessly reboot. Workers around the world were greeted with what is known as the “blue screen of death” on their computers. Insufficient testing at CrowdStrike was a likely source of the problem, experts said.

As computers restarted themselves over and over, known as the “doom loop,” there was little CrowdStrike could do to fix the problem. Tech staff at affected companies were faced with a choice: walk around to each machine and remove the bit of flawed code, or wait and hope for a solution from CrowdStrike.

The problems cascaded instantly. At Sydney Airport in Australia, travelers encountered delays and cancellations, as did those in Hong Kong, India, Dubai, Berlin and Amsterdam. At least five U.S. airlines — Allegiant Air, American, Delta, Spirit and United — grounded all flights for a time, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

How the airline cancellations rippled around the world (and across time zones)

Share of canceled flights at 25 airports on Friday

50% of flights

Ai r po r t

Bengalu r u K empeg o wda

Dhaka Shahjalal

Minneapolis-Saint P aul

Stuttga r t

Melbou r ne

Be r lin B r anden b urg

London City

Amsterdam Schiphol

Chicago O'Hare

Raleigh−Durham

B r adl e y

Cha r lotte

Reagan National

Philadelphia

1:20 a.m. ET

Health care systems were crippled, forcing hospitals to cancel noncritical surgeries. In the United States, 911 lines went down in multiple states, though many of those problems were being resolved later on Friday. Britain’s National Health Service also reported issues.

“We knew we had a catastrophe on our hands,” said B.J. Moore, the chief information officer for Providence Health, which has 52 hospitals in seven states. He said 15,000 servers were down and 40,000 out of Providence’s 150,000 computers were affected, adding that it was “worse than a cyberattack."

The United Parcel Service and FedEx said they were affected. Customers with TD Bank, one of the biggest banks in the United States, reported issues accessing their online accounts. Several state and municipal court systems closed for the day because of the outage.

At CrowdStrike, engineers described an atmosphere of confusion as the company struggled to contain the damage.

Executives urged employees not to speculate on why the mistake happened and directed them to focus on a fix for the computers that were affected, said two engineers who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Computers not connected to the cloud required a physical fix to the error introduced by CrowdStrike, they said, which could take weeks.

Within several hours of the faulty software going out, CrowdStrike sent out a software patch as a fix that would stop computers from endlessly rebooting.

Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant, said the outage would still take time to resolve because a suggested solution for some organizations involved rebooting each computer manually into safe mode, deleting a specific file and then restarting the computer.

While that is a relatively straightforward process, security experts said, it may not be easy to do at scale. Those with organized and well-staffed information technology teams could potentially fix the issues more quickly, Mr. Olejnik said.

Unlike the iPhone software updates that Apple sends to customers, the incident highlighted information technology systems that operate in the background. The CrowdStrike issues were compounded because the software being updated performed critical cybersecurity tasks, giving it access to scan a computer to look for viruses and other malicious attacks.

Cybersecurity tools operate quietly in the background to defend computers against attacks. The software is frequently updated with new defenses as hackers develop fresh methods of attack, but constant updates mean there are many opportunities for mistakes to happen.

“One of the tricky parts of security software is it needs to have absolute privileges over your entire computer in order to do its job,” said Thomas Parenty, a cybersecurity consultant and a former U.S. National Security Agency analyst. “So if there’s something wrong with it, the consequences are vastly greater than if your spreadsheet doesn’t work.”

On Friday, the stock price of CrowdStrike, which reported $3 billion in annual revenue last year, closed down 11 percent.

CrowdStrike’s stock price so far this year

The company faces questions about what liabilities it and other software makers face for major disruptions and cybersecurity incidents. The consequences for significant outages can be so minimal that companies are not motivated to make more fundamental changes, experts said. While a car manufacturer would face stiff penalties for faulty brakes, a software provider can often issue another update and move on.

“Until software companies have to pay a price for faulty products, we will be no safer tomorrow than we are today,” Mr. Parenty said.

Meaghan Tobin , Aaron Krolik and Jill Cowan contributed reporting.

Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London. More about Adam Satariano

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul. More about Paul Mozur

Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected]. More about Kate Conger

Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel