On July 19, 2024, a global technology outage knocked down systems involved in critical services for multiple vital services, including airports, hospitals, 911 services, banks, and more. CrowdStrike, an American-based cybersecurity company, was responsible for the massive outage.
The company provides cybersecurity, threat prevention, and hacking assessment services to many major institutions around the globe. The outage came from a faulty content update pushed out by CrowdStrike on certain Windows hosts. The president and CEO took to Twitter (X) to relay information about the current situation.
Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected. We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on. As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts. For the latest information that we will continuously update, please refer to the CrowdStrike website (https://crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-windows-sensor-update/), my posts on LinkedIn, and my posts on X. I will continue to provide updates to our community and the industry as they become available.
According to Kurtz, “a fix has been deployed” and all systems should be working by Saturday. While this is all well and good, it is certainly disturbing that a single company’s faulty software update knocked out multiple sectors of critical electronic infrastructure.
Sources:
Suliman, A. (2024, July 19). Live updates: After massive IT outage for airlines and health care, officials see signs of recovery. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/19/microsoft-windows-outage-blue-screen-bsod/
Goswami, R. (2024, July 19). Microsoft-CrowdStrike issue causes 'largest IT outage in history' — Live updates. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/19/latest-live-updates-on-a-major-it-outage-spreading-worldwide.html
(2024, July 19). A massive tech outage is causing worldwide disruptions. Here's what we know. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/what-is-crowdstrike-worldwide-outage-94b4fc5ac6eed46ddcd565a5f1e4b916
Lyngaas, S. (2024, July 19). What is Crowdstrike and how is it linked to the global outage?. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/tech/crowdstrike-update-global-outage-explainer/index.html
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