CrowdStrike, Microsoft Outage Causes Global IT Meltdown

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s update early Friday wreaked havoc on Microsoft Windows hosts globally, canceling flights, impacting hospitals, banks, news organizations, railways, and other critical services as companies scramble to find a fix.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on his LinkedIn account said the outage was not the result of a cyberattack and blamed a defective update to its Falcon antivirus software. The Austin-based CrowdStrike has become a major player in IT with 24,000 customers globally. The company boasts usage by about half of Fortune 500 firms.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” he wrote.  “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not the result of a security incident or cyberattack. 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.”

In a response on LinkedIn, Jose Calderon, IT director for the city of El Segundo, Calif., wrote, “A fail this historic deserves to have the fix be posted on your homepage and ALL your socials ASAP. Teams all around the world are running fire drills right now to get a handle on things and you want us to open a ticket?!!!”

In a statement to InformationWeek, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote, "Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”

Microsoft noted that the company does not believe the latest outage is related to a July 18 outage that impacted some Azure customers.

Former Microsoft CIO and author Jim DuBois tells InformationWeek, "Anytime a vendor does an update, they have a chance to screw things up, if you don't test well. When multiple suppliers are involved, it is more complex."

The travel industry was one of the biggest victims of the day, with Airports in the US, Australia, Japan, India, Europe, and more causing outages and delays. Hospitals were also badly hit. Israel said 15 hospitals had to switch to manual processes and ambulances were told to take cases to other hospitals, according to BBC.

CrowdStrike’s support forum posted an alert early Friday, saying the problem was “related to Falcon Sensor,” which is its cloud-based security service. 

Read the rest of this article on InformationWeek.

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