A global technology outage on Friday grounded flights, disrupted health services, crashed payment systems, and blocked access to Microsoft services in what experts believe is one of the largest IT failures in history.
The cause of the disruptions originated from a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, which provides software to a wide range of industries. An update to one of CrowdStrike’s software products, Falcon Sensor, malfunctioned, leading to major tech failures worldwide. This botched update affected computers running Windows, resulting in significant disruptions across various sectors.
CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity firm founded in 2011 and based in Austin, Texas, has grown rapidly by offering a range of security services using cloud-based software. It boasts on its website that it protects 538 out of the Fortune 1000 companies. Despite its rapid growth and a market value of around $83 billion at market close on Thursday, CrowdStrike’s share value declined dramatically, falling by as much as 13% on Friday following the outage.
The company’s primary products are designed to block hackers and malware, but CrowdStrike has also been hired to investigate major data breaches. Notably, it was tasked with investigating the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers in 2016 and a 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures linked to North Korea. CrowdStrike’s investigation into the DNC hack also played a role in the first impeachment of Donald Trump and the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The global outage stemmed from an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity platform, Falcon. This update caused a malfunction that disabled systems and software worldwide. CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, apologized for the outage, which the company attributed to a faulty piece of code. Kurtz emphasized that this was not a security incident or cyberattack and that the issue had been identified, isolated, and fixed. He directed customers to the support portal for updates and assured continuous updates on the company’s website.
Compounding the chaos on Friday, another outage hit Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, causing additional failures. Microsoft stated that the two outages were unrelated and that its Azure services were back online. Kurtz mentioned on NBC’s Today show that it could take some time before systems fully recover from the outage caused by his company.