Who is CrowdStrike? Tech Company Behind Virus Update That Triggered Microsoft’s ‘Doomsday’ Outage Worldwide

The IT outage that is creating chaos across the world appears to result from a dubious update sent by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Television channels, banks, hospitals, airports and emergency services were all hit by the system failure.

5

5

The founder of cyber research firm Imperum Senad Aruc described the incident as “CrowdStrike Doom’s Day”.

He wrote on X: “It looks like Crowdstrike Dooms Day is real, many airlines are having problems with their systems. Schiphol airport is frozen.”

CrowdStrike is an IT security company based in Austin, Texas that provides a platform for protecting data and is allegedly used by Microsoft.

The company offers a platform called “Falcon Sensor” designed to “block attacks on your systems while capturing and recording activity to quickly detect threats.”

But the Falcon Sensor software appears to have caused the crash.

CrowdStrike published a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of flaws in Microsoft’s Windows operating system related to its Falcon platform.

A pre-recorded message read: “Thank you for contacting Crowdstrike support. Crowdstrike is aware of reports of Windows crashes… related to the Falcon sensor.”

An alert on the CrowdStrike support page said: “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.

“Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bug check/blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.

“Our engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.”

The company regularly updates systems with new antivirus software.

Cyber ​​expert Troy Hunt told Australian TV network Seven: “It appears they have released a bad update, which is currently destroying all machines using it.”

Other cyber experts said this illustrates the dangers of an interconnected world so dependent on IT functioning properly.

CyberCX chief strategy officer Alastair MacGibbon told the Sydney Morning Herald: “This highlights the interconnected nature of the software.

“It’s that classic situation: the more hyperconnected we are, the more a single problem that goes wrong can cause cascading effects across the world.”

Microsoft announced that it was taking “mitigation actions” to fix the issues.

They said via X: “Our services still show ongoing improvements as we continue to take mitigation actions.”

Meanwhile, Brits have been warned about travel chaos caused by the disruption/

Ryanair told passengers to arrive three hours early, while Govia Thameslink Railway warned of disruptions amid “widespread IT issues”.

The Sun has contacted CrowdStrike for comment.

5

5