A widespread IT outage crippled thousands of businesses and individuals on Friday after a software glitch at CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose services are used by many organizations.
This resulted in several Microsoft Windows devices showing the ‘blue screen of death’, leading to system crashes and disruptions across businesses such as airlines, banks, retailers, media companies and stock markets, to name a few.
CrowdStrike has acknowledged the problem and is working on a solution. While some systems have reportedly recovered, the full extent of the damage and recovery timeline remains unknown.
What is CrowdStrike?
Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity technology company. Its solutions are used by businesses across the globe. The company offers solutions like cloud workload protection, endpoint security, threat intelligence and cyberattack response services.
What caused the outage?
The outage is primarily attributed to a malfunctioning update from CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, a critical component of their endpoint security software, designed to protect devices from cyber threats.
According to reports, the latest update contained a bug that caused the sensor to conflict with the Windows operating system. This resulted in the infamous ‘blue screen of death’.
Later, the company issued a statement, confirming this.
“CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems. The sensor configuration update that caused the system crash was remediated on Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC. This issue is not the result of or related to a cyberattack,” the company said.
What is the Falcon Sensor?
The Falcon Sensor is a key component of CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection platform. The software is instaled on devices to provide real-time protection from cyber threats.
The main functions of the sensor include detecting threats, gathering data about devices, endpoint protection and sharing data with the CrowdStrike cloud for further processing.
The impact
In the US, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air grounded flights citing communication problems.
Meanwhile, media companies, banks and telecom companies in Australia struggled to operate, with several people reporting they were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors went offline while broadcasters said they wouldn’t be able to telecast live.
The company said customers running Falcon sensor for Windows version 7.11 and above, that were online between Friday, July 19, 2024 04:09 UTC and Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC, may be impacted. Systems running Falcon sensor for Windows 7.11 and above that downloaded the updated configuration from 04:09 UTC to 05:27 UTC – were susceptible to a system crash.
For more technology news, click here.
