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Many banks, media companies and airlines experienced the blue screen of death this morning when they turned on their Microsoft Windows machines. The dreaded error page saying “Your device encountered a problem and needs to restart” was caused by a single update from Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant with offices in over 170 countries.
The majority (70%) of CrowdStrike's $900 million in revenue for the quarter ended April came from its U.S. customers, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
CrowdStrike's wide reach resulted in what some cybersecurity experts called “the largest IT outage in history.” The update delayed Delta, United and American Airlines flights, caused the cancellation of scheduled surgeries at hospitals in Massachusetts and Ohio, disrupted emergency calls and impacted other public and private operations around the world.
George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike. Martina Albertazzi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz wrote in an X-post on Friday that CrowdStrike had found the cause of the problem and released a fix.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” he stressed, adding that organizations should communicate with CrowdStrike representatives and check the support page.
“Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers,” he added.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers affected by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed. We…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz), July 19, 2024
In a blog post, he said: “We know that adversaries and malicious actors will try to exploit such events. I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure you are engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives.”
Kurtz also apologized to TODAY for the outage and gave more details about what went wrong, explaining that the update implemented by CrowdStrike contained a software bug that caused problems with the Microsoft Windows operating system.
“When the systems come back online after the reboot, they will work again,” he said. “Now we are working with each individual customer to make sure we can get them back online.”
When asked how a single content update could bring down everything from emergency services to credit card payment systems around the world without backup, Kurtz said, “We need to go back and see what happened here.”
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CrowdStrike is currently the global market leader in endpoint security, or protection for devices such as desktops and laptops.
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