On Friday morning, major airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage spread globally. The outage, causing the Blue Screen of Death on Windows machines worldwide, is linked to CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike, since its launch in 2011, has played a crucial role in preventing security breaches, investigating significant cyberattacks like the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 and the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, the Texas-based company’s valuation was over $83 billion.
With around 29,000 customers, including over 500 on the Fortune 1000 list, according to CrowdStrike’s website, the company’s popularity amplified the impact when something went wrong. Systems using CrowdStrike and Windows-based hardware went offline en masse. CEO George Kurtz stated that they are “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” stressing that it’s not a cyberattack and doesn’t affect Mac or Linux machines.
The July 19th outage is tied to CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform, which combines multiple security solutions into one hub, including antivirus, endpoint protection, threat detection, and real-time monitoring. The faulty update installed software that disrupted the core Windows OS, causing systems to get stuck in a boot loop, displaying an error message that says, “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly.”
Many companies, including this airline in India, had to revert to manual operations. Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, noted the interconnected nature of such software systems, highlighting the risk of single points of failure. Although CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, restoring functionality could take “days to weeks,” as IT administrators may need physical access to devices. The speed of recovery depends on the size and resources of a company’s IT team, with most systems expected to be recoverable.
