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By Jasmine Laws
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The Paris Olympics organizing committee said its IT operations have been affected by a worldwide outage, although the impact is limited.
The outage was caused by an issue relating to the cyber-security software CrowdStrike. It particularly impacted Microsoft users across the world, many of whom were unable to access apps and services including Microsoft Teams.
The Paris Olympics committee said on Friday that the outage had mainly affected the delivery of uniforms and accreditations, Reuters reported.
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"Paris 2024's ticketing systems have been unaffected. The operations around the preparation of venues is continuing normally, and work schedules are not at risk. The torch relay is continuing along its route as normal," the committee told Reuters.
The Paris 2024 communications department updated Newsweek: "All of Paris 2024's operations are now running normally, following this morning's global IT issue, which had temporarily affected a limited number of our own IT services."
They added, "Consequently, our accreditation centres have been able to resume operations. The Uniform and Accreditation Centre in Paris is open again and its opening hours this evening have been extended from 9 p.m to 11 p.m."
The tech outage has also disrupted airlines, banks, and other industries, including emergency services across multiple states in the US.
CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz said in a statement on X that the issue had been "identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."
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The Paris Olympics are set to begin on July 26 and are expected to sell over 13 million tickets, bringing more than 15 million visitors to Paris. The city's tourism office predicts the games will generate around €3.5 billion, or $3.8 billion, according to its website.
In May, Reuters reported that the Paris Olympics organizers were stress-testing their cybersecurity systems due to a high risk of cyberattacks ahead of the Games. They worked with the French national agency for information security (ANSSI) and cybersecurity companies Cisco and Eviden to limit the impact of potential attacks on the Games.
The director general of ANSII, Vincent Strubel, told reporters, "We can't prevent all the attacks, there will not be Games without attacks but we have to limit their impacts on the Olympics." He added, "There are 500 sites, competition venues, and local collectives, and we've tested them all."
Strubel explained the Games "are facing an unprecedented level of threat, but we've done an unprecedented amount of preparation work so I think we're a step ahead of the attackers."
The preparation involved paying ethical hackers to test their protected systems, alongside using artificial intelligence to assist in the prevention of online threats.
Problems relating to cybersecurity threats during the Olympic Games were also prevalent during Pyeongchang Winter Games in South Korea in 2018, when the official site crashed just before the beginning of the opening ceremony. TV coverage of the Games was also affected but restored after 12 hours.
During the London Games in 2012, Konstantinos Karagiannis, chief technology officer for security consulting at telecoms provider BT, tweeted during the Olympics that he and his team "fought back quite a cyber-onslaught," according to the BBC.
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