Computer systems across the world went into complete halt on Friday following a faulty software update to the Windows system from CrowdStrike.
This brough an utter panic and outage across the globe.
Keep reading the news to know a much-needed details about this global outage.
What is CrowdStrike Outage? How did its update for Microsoft bring the world to a standstill?
The world has witnessed the biggest-ever IT outage in the past few days where computer systems have gone for a toss in almost every corner of the globe. On Friday, a tech glitch had caused chaos across sectors, with aviation bearing the worst brunt because systems were inaccessible. The whole issue took place due to a software update from CrowdStrike to Microsoft Azure that went horribly wrong. The faulty update led to a blue screen of death on thousands of PCs that had updated their software.
Both Microsoft and CrowdStrike have been troubleshooting the crisis and later in the day, Microsoft said many of its services were slowly back to normal. CrowdStrike also ruled out that the incident was a cyberattack. In the process, CrowdStrike has been the talking point on the Internet, with the statements from CEO George Kurtz, even as the stock prices of the cyber firm dropped after the outage.
What did the CrowdStrike CEO say about the outage?
What did the CrowdStrike CEO say about the outage?
According to George Kurtz, the chief executive of CrowdStrike, the company took responsibility for the mistake and that a software fix had already been released. He further warned that returning to normal may take time.
He said in an interview on Friday on NBC’s “Today” show, “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this.”
But what is CrowdStrike? And how does it concern the global IT industry?
CrowdStrike is a cyber security company based in US. It was founded in the year *2011* by George Kurtz, Dimitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. Kurtz was the founder of the Foundstone and served as the chief technology officer for McAfee. Alperovitch is an author and the founder while Marston is reportedly retired. The ownership includes institutional, retail, and individual investors.
According to the *2023* report by Canalys, CrowdStrike is the global leader in endpoint security and held 18.5% of the market in Q2 2023. To this end, several reports have remarked that the company’s stocks have risen by 400% over the past five years.
CrowdStrike has been known for its customized cyber security solutions for large organizations to help them in their complex security architecture. Further, the organizations that are using CrowdStrike’s service have appreciated the user-friendly solutions and acclaimed its accuracy while detecting threats.
What is Crowdstrike used for?
What is Crowdstrike used for?
Thousands of organizations worldwide use CrowdStrike to keep their data secure, so when the flawed software update that went live on Friday led to a worldwide outage of Microsoft products.
CrowdStrike solutions are only retailed to large organisations. This explains why a lot of people did not face the blue screen of death, an error screen on Microsoft Windows indicating a system crash.
Falcon is the core product by CrowdStrike, which the company claims to give indicators of attack in real-time and high accuracy for the detection of potential cybersecurity threats, with automated protection.
CrowdStrike released an update to its CrowdStrike Falcon on July 15, claiming that it will stop the breaches with “unprecedented speed and precision across the entire enterprise attack surface”. After the CrowdStrike outage, an official stated that the event was most likely caused by a fault with the Falcon product.
