Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert website is urging people to check their car or home insurance if they bought it on Friday – as you could potentially cancel it for a better deal.
The global IT outages caused by Crowdstrike’s technical issues may have had a knock on effect on your finances, MSE warned.
Martin Lewis, who founded the Money Saving Expert website, is always sharing tips on how to get the cheapest car insurance deals.
And now his team has warned that if you bought an insurance policy on Friday, July 19, you could have been overcharged or got a poorer deal because various companies’ systems weren’t operational, so some good deals may have been missing.
Compare the Market and MoneySupermarket both told MSE that a “small number” of both car and home insurance providers were affected, which led to fewer quotes being offered than normal.
If you bought car or home insurance on July 19, or got a quote, it’s worth checking again to see if you can save.
Because it’s still less than 14 days since July 19, you can cancel your policy at no cost with no fees if you bought it online due to the Distance Selling Regulations Act, which means you must have the right to cancel for a full refund for any reason within 14 days if you bought something online, including contracts.
Major infrastructure ground to a halt after computer systems were knocked offline, and devices were showing the so-called “blue screen of death”, affecting key sectors across the world.
Around the world, banks, supermarkets and other major institutions reported computer issues disrupting services, while many businesses were unable to take digital payments.
Overnight, Microsoft warned of “service degradation” which meant users were not able to access many of the tech giant’s most popular services and apps, used by millions of businesses and people around the world.
Among the impacted firms was Ryanair, with the airline posting to its website: “Potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global third party system outage.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is “actively working” to fix a “defect” in an update for Microsoft Windows users which sparked a global IT outage, the company’s chief executive has said.
George Kurtz said Mac and Linux users were not impacted by the fault and it was “not a security incident or cyber attack”.
He wrote on X: “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.
“We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.
“We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”
