The planet was woken up on Friday by news of a global IT meltdown resulting in thousands of grounded flights, airports in chaos, customers unable to access their accounts via banking apps, pay for products and credit card services, patients were unable to meet doctors or undergo surgery.
Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike admitted that the cause of the outage was a “flaw” in a Windows software update, and its CEO George Kurtz said engineers have been working to fix the problem, finding the most a solution can be found quickly.
Crowdstrike launched in 2012 as a cybersecurity company with “the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform” to detect and block hacking threats. The company provides services to approximately 300 Fortune500 companies, as well as major technology and automotive companies, and healthcare providers.
Company CEO George Kurtz said the outage was caused by a faulty patch for Windows (patch is a small piece of software that is used to update or improve a program and fix a security vulnerability).
Mac and Linux PCs were not affected. This was not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue affected a Windows update of the Falcon Sensor software, which resulted in the appearance of Blue Screens of Death (BSOD), a typical error message on Windows systems when computer activity is interrupted.
On X, Kurtz questioned why the patch wasn’t tested before being released worldwide. User David Hajek (@hajekd) responded to Kurtz’s statement by saying, “We made a mistake and we’re sorry.” Many users intervened to request an apology from the users who suffered damage from the IT Down.
After the accident the company suffered a large loss on its share price and revenue: early trading on Friday wiped 20% – estimated at around $16 billion (14.7 billion euros) – from its valuation.
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