The Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is connected to the global Microsoft outage that struck banks, airlines, and other organizations on Friday.
The business offers Microsoft antivirus software for Windows devices, and a wide range of international businesses, including banking, retail, and healthcare, employ the program to guard against security lapses and cyberattacks.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement that the outages on Friday, which resulted in the reappearance of the so-called “blue screen of death,” were triggered by “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” According to him, the problem was “not a security incident or cyberattack,” and it did not impact Mac or Linux hosts.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
In addition to offering security software to many businesses, CrowdStrike also conducts hacker investigations and tracking. It calls itself “a leader in protecting customers around the world from cyber threats” and added that “it is common for organizations to hire third-party industry experts, like CrowdStrike, to investigate and remediate cyber attacks when they suspect a breach even if they are collaborating with law enforcement.”
The company claims to have monitored North Korean hackers for years in addition to looking into the 2016 Russian hack on DNC servers.
The Microsoft outage: what was the cause?
The business was made aware of reports of breakdowns on Microsoft systems involving its Falcon Sensor software, according to a prerecorded message. Using “cloud-delivered technologies that prevent all types of attacks,” Falcon is a CrowdStrike solution that, according to the company, attempts to thwart breaches.
Kurtz stated on Friday that the problem has been fixed.
The business was made aware of reports of breakdowns on Microsoft systems involving its Falcon Sensor software, according to a prerecorded message. Using “cloud-delivered technologies that prevent all types of attacks,” Falcon is a CrowdStrike solution that, according to the company, attempts to thwart breaches.
Kurtz stated on Friday that the problem has been fixed.
“This was not a code update,” Kurtz stated. “This was actually an update of content. And what that means is there’s a single file that drives some additional logic on how we look for bad actors, and this logic was pushed out and caused an issue only in the Microsoft environment specific to this bug that we had.”
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“We identified this very quickly and rolled back this particular content file,” he stated.
Rebooting many systems “makes the problem go away and gets fixed,” he said, but it will take “hours” or “a little bit longer” for other systems to recover.
“We’re working individually with each and every customer to make sure that we can get them up and running and operational,” Kurtz said.
Stock of CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike’s stock price dropped $42.22, or more than 12%, to little over $300 in afternoon trade as a result of the outage’s global ramifications.
However, the failure is more likely to damage CrowdStrike’s reputation than cause a significant financial loss for the over $73 billion security company.
