CrowdStrike causes Global Outage for Microsoft Windows

For a long time, people have worried that some evil hacker would takeover the worlds critical computers and cause a global outage that would cause damage on a scale so great that it would be called catastrophic. Well the company CrowdStrike seemingly decided to not wait for a evil hacker to do it and instead deploy a faulty component in their security software which went ahead and caused a global outage for millions of people. On July 19th, millions of Microsoft Windows users started to get hit by the infamous BSOD or Blue Screen of Death and frustrated IT departments began getting endless amounts of calls for systems being down. It wasn’t too long before we started to see that this was a much bigger problem but no one was expecting to be as big of an impact as it truly was.

A lot of people are misplacing the blame onto Microsoft because it is only affecting Windows machines but to be clear, this is not Microsoft’s fault in this instance unless you count how poorly of an operating system it is to seemingly require something like to exist but that’s a different topic. This was not caused by Microsoft directly but rather the company, CrowdStrike.

Tons of people were scrambling to figure out what was happening because this buggy update broke millions of machines impacting millions of people through outages for Hospitals, Airlines, emergency services, payment processors, Stock Exchanges, TV networks, and so many other types of businesses causing what could be accurately labeled as chaos.

The CEO of CrowdStrike went on CNBC to apologize for the issue and provide some explanations. He said that this was not a cyber-attack and it was not a code update but rather a faulty content update. Content refers to things that the tools are looking for to identify malware and bad actors.

The solution to fix this issue ranges from simply rebooting systems albeit up to 15 times back to back but also all the way to requiring IT departments to manually send someone to physically fix each machine manually by removing the offending file. Due to the complexity of the issue and the massive impact it caused, some companies have been able to get back up and running but there are still many industries struggling to get back to normal operations.

The CrowdStrike Outage did not affect Linux users or macOS users, just Windows users. Now CrowdStrike is available on Linux and macOS but the faulty content was specific to Windows machines which is why only Windows machines were impacted by this bug. Does this mean that Linux is better than Windows? Yes. Well I guess not exactly since it wasn’t Windows’ fault directly but yes, Linux is certainly better in many ways. That’s a different topic for a different day I suppose.

I have seen some people downplaying the impact of this issue which is shocking to see I mean sure it was isolated to 1 planet and didn’t impact mars but other than that it was a massive problem. I think it is good that CrowdStrike quickly acknowledged the problem and didn’t try to pass the buck so at least that’s good but how did this happen? You would think they would have a large test environment for testing things before they deploy them and in theory this would have been found.

I would assume a company with an annual revenue of Three Billion dollars like CrowdStrike could afford to have a testing environment large enough to catch stuff like this, such as having a hundred Windows machines to deploy updates to make sure each update is stable prior to deploying it to the rest of the world. However, also I am aware that’s not the typical way of doing things so I’m not surprised if they don’t have a testing structure like that.

In hindsight, there were probably many things that CrowdStrike could have done better to prevent this from happening but as they say “accidents happen”. You know that reminds me of Hanlon’s razor. Hanlon’s razor is an old adage that states: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I’m not calling them stupid, that’s just what the adage says. Though they probably do feel a bit stupid right now.

So what will happen? This is a question that everyone is asking. I’m guessing there will probably be investigations by various countries, CrowdStrike’s stock price already plummeted quite a bit, there will very likely be many lawsuits from the damages it caused which some reports are saying trillions of dollars in damage but who knows. It will be fascinating to see how the dominoes fall for this one. To everyone affected by this outage, I hope all is well for you and if it isn’t I hope it gets resolved as soon as possible and to everyone at CrowdStrike . . . I guess, just, good luck.