TMicrosoft’s massive IT outage on Friday, which grounded flights, took TV stations offline and brought online hospital systems to a halt, was linked to a third party — a cybersecurity technology company called CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz spoke about the outage, apologizing for the disturbance caused.
As the fallout from the event continues to impact people around the world, here’s a rundown of exactly how CrowdStrike was involved and what happened.
What caused Microsoft’s outage?
On Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system began reporting devices displaying what is commonly referred to as “blue screens of death.” According to the Microsoft website, this happens “if a serious problem causes Windows to shut down or restart unexpectedly.”
These disruptions spread quickly, impacting businesses and communities around the world. The UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands and the US reported disruptions. Meanwhile, United, Delta and American Airlines issued a “global land stop”on all flights.
The cause of this outage came from a faulty CrowdStrike update deployed to computers running Microsoft Windows. The problem was specifically linked to Falcon, one of the company’s main products, which does not impact Mac or Linux operating systems.
Launched in 2012, CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software is now used by 298 of the Fortune 500 companiesincluding banks, energy companies, healthcare companies and food companies.
How has CrowdStrike responded to the disruption felt around the world?
Appearing via video link on The Today On Friday’s show, CrowdStrike’s CEO issued an apology to the public:
“We deeply regret the impact we have had on customers, travelers and anyone affected by this, including our companies,” Kurtz said. “This update contained a software bug and caused an issue with Microsoft’s operating system…we identified this very quickly and fixed the issue.”
Kurtz made it clear that this was not a cybersecurity issue or any type of attack, but a problem coming from within the company.
Although they have implemented the necessary changes to help resolve the issue, customers are still experiencing issues and it may be some time before systems around the world are fully operational.
In a statement emailed to TIME, CrowdStrike said it is “actively working with customers affected by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
They also clarified, once again, those concerned that the issue is not a security incident and that the issue has been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Kurtz also shared this information on his personal account X (formerly Twitter).
Microsoft 365 posted in X that the company was “working on redirecting impacted traffic to alternative systems to alleviate the impact” and that it was “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
TIME has reached out to Microsoft 365 for further comment.
At the Today Show segment, Kurtz said CrowdStrike was on the phone with customers all night and the issue was resolved for many when they restarted their systems. However, he says the company will not “relent until we get all customers back to where they were and keep the bad guys out of their systems.”
If hosts are still crashing and unable to get online to download the CrowdStrike fix, the company has provided a workaround to the problem on your blog
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23951407/STK051_VRG_Illo_N_Barclay_5_tiktok.jpg?w=300&resize=300,300&ssl=1 "TikTok is one of Microsoft’s largest AI cloud computing customers")
