A global tech outage, which is resolved by now managed to affect global IT systems on Friday, with industries including banking to airlines.
Banks, health care systems and even news channels came to a halt when microsoft crashed.
At the heart of the issue is Texas-based cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike
.On Friday, the cybersecurity firm experienced a major disruption following an issue with a software update.
So, what has happened? NewsX explains
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that creates software to help businesses detect and prevent hacks. Many Fortune 500 companies, including big banks, healthcare, and energy companies, use their products. CrowdStrike is known as an “endpoint security” firm because it uses cloud technology to protect internet-connected devices, unlike other cyber firms that protect back-end servers directly.
Nick France, CTO at IT security firm Sectigo, explained to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” that many companies install CrowdStrike software on all their devices. If an update has issues, it can cause problems like machines rebooting, preventing people from accessing their computers.
On Friday, people worldwide encountered a “blue screen of death” error, commonly seen on PCs when they overheat. This issue was due to an update from CrowdStrike for its Falcon product, which is designed to prevent cyber breaches using cloud technology. CrowdStrike announced that it is working on rolling back the update globally.
What is Crowdstrike?
CrowdStrike’s software needs deep access to a computer’s operating system to check for threats. On Friday, computers running Microsoft Windows crashed because of a problem with how a CrowdStrike update interacted with Windows.
Microsoft said in an update that the issue started around 7:00 PM UTC on July 18 and affected virtual machines running Windows Client and Windows Server with the CrowdStrike Falcon agent. These machines encountered a “blue screen of death” and got stuck restarting. Microsoft confirmed that CrowdStrike has removed the problematic update and advised customers still having issues to contact CrowdStrike for help.
Satnam Narang, a senior researcher at Tenable, told CNBC that this kind of outage is very unusual. He explained that security software needs more access to protect machines, so the problem is not with Windows itself but with the faulty update from the security software.
