CrowdStrike blames the bug for allowing bad data to pass through, leading to global technological disruption

CrowdStrike is blaming a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to send bad data to millions of customer computers, triggering last week’s issue. global technological disruption which suspended flights, took television broadcasts off the air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.

CrowdStrike also outlined steps it would take to prevent the issue from recurring, including staggering the rollout of updates, giving customers more control over when and where they occur, and providing more details about the updates it plans.

The company on Wednesday posted online details of its “preliminary post-incident analysis ”of the outage, which caused chaos for many companies that pay for the cybersecurity company’s software services.

The issue involved an “undetected error” in the content configuration update of its Falcon platform, affecting Windows machines, the Texas company said.

A bug in the content validation system allowed “problematic content data” to be deployed to CrowdStrike customers. This triggered an “unexpected exception” that caused the Windows operating system to crash, the company said.

As part of the new prevention measures, CrowdStrike said it is also beefing up internal testing as well as implementing “re-checking” to prevent “this type of problematic content” from being deployed again.

CrowdStrike said a “significant number” of the approximately 8.5 million computers that crashed on Friday, causing global outages, are back in operation as customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.

Once the investigation is complete, CrowdStrike said it will publicly release its full analysis of the collapse.

The interruption caused days of widespread technological destructionhighlighted how much the world depends in some major computing service providers and attracted the attention of regulators who want more details about what went wrong.