The CrowdStrike Incident, And The Microsoft Issue That Created The Biggest IT Outage In History

A software can be so huge and so widely used, that it requires a lot of vendors as partners to keep it functioning and running.

Because of this, certain software can have features and functions that are so integrated to its system, that an issue can cause it to fail entirely.

One example of this, is the CrowdStrike incident, which happened instantly following a faulty update to its security software.

When the American cybersecurity technology company that provides cloud workload protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services, distributed a faulty update to its security software, the move caused a global catastrophe that rendered an estimated millions of computers and virtual machines running Microsoft Windows to crash.

The affected computers, which were mostly business and governmental machines, were caught in a a boot loop or in recovery mode.

The outage that happens worldwide, with so many systems unable to restart, effectively disrupted so many critical services, including airlines, airports, banks, hotels, hospitals, manufacturing, stock markets, broadcasting, and many other services.

A number of services, such as emergency services and websites, were also affected.

In all, the outage reported around the globe, CrowdStrike more or less, 'crowd strike' the world.

The incident has since been described as the largest in the history of information technology and "historic in scale."

All that, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of Microsoft Windows in those affected systems.

The faulty update CrowdStrike was pushing, resulted in a blue screen of death (BSOD) on virtual machines running Windows virtual machines on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The problem primarily affected systems running Windows 10 and Windows 11, with lesser number of systems were running Windows 7 and 8.

A much lesser number of systems that use Google Compute Engine also reported the problem.

Computers running macOS and Linux were unaffected, as were most personal Windows PCs.

While the problem could be temporarily mitigated by restoring the affected system by booting into safe mode or the Windows Recovery Environment, and deleting certain files with certain a timestamp, the manual process was inefficient, and was "expected to take days."

But what made it worse is that, the problem was exacerbated on devices with Windows' BitLocker disk encryption enabled.

With that many computers couldn't turn on and function, CrowdStrike literally created the biggest ransomware attack, by mistake.

To what extent the issue goes, at the time of the incident, CrowdStrike said it had more than 24,000 customers, including nearly 60% of Fortune 500 companies and more than half of the Fortune 1,000.

Microsoft estimates that 8.5 million devices were affected by the update.

CrowdStrike is a company that develops a suite of security software products for businesses, designed to protect computers from cyberattacks.

And here, it has what it calls the Falcon Sensor product, which is CrowdStrike's vulnerability scanner. This installs an endpoint sensor at the operating system kernel level on individual computers to detect and prevent threats.

Due to the nature of cybersecurity that is always evolving, CrowdStrike needs to continuously maintain this product. And because of that, the company routinely distributes patches and updates to clients, so their computers can address new threats.

But on July 19th, an update to this Falcon software crashed the many systems that has the software running.

Sooner after realizing the mishap, CrowdStrike reverted the update, and forced affected devices to reboot.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz explained the the issue stemmed from CrowdStrike's faulty kernel configuration file update, and that a fix was deployed.

According to reports, the outage have costed the entire system more than $20 billion in its first day.

It's worth noting though, that some countries were less affected than others.

Those that rely less on Western products, like China that thrive through its own self-sufficient IT systems, as well as countries restricted by international sanctions, like Russia and Iran, were all experiencing far less disruptions.

Some of their services even reported no disruptions, whatsoever.

A day later, as the world is trying to heal itself from Crowdstike's crowd strike, and with the many people seemingly trying to find someone or something to blame, Vincent Flibustier claimed to be the the one responsible.

He said that he was a newly hired CrowdStrike employee responsible, and that his job was to just upload an update, and that's it.

"First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off," he said in a post on X.

Quickly, the post gained traction, for the very obvious reason.

The truth is that, he is just parodying things, and only tried his luck piggybacking the trend that happens on the internet, to make a name for himself.

To do this, Flibustier created a manipulated photo of himself outside the CrowdStrike office, and to amplify his message, he made a follow-up post claiming he had been fired, and later, posted a video "confessing" to causing the global outage.

His X bio was even updated to read: "Former Crowdstrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimise. Looking for a job as Sysadmin."

He even mentioned X owner Elon Musk, and asked for a job.

While intended as satire, thousands of users took Flibustier's posts and mock him for what he claimed he did.

Many users seemingly directed their fury and anger, and frustration towards him.

Some however, praised him for inadvertently creating a work-free Friday or

But the truth is that, Flibustier is just satirical writer who runs a Belgian parody news site.

In an interview, he shed light on why his joke resonated so strongly online.

"People are drawn to stories that confirm their preconceptions... No culprit named yet, I bring it on a platter, people like to have a culprit. The culprit seems completely stupid, he is proud of his stupidity, he takes his afternoon off on the first day of work. This falls right into a huge buzz in which people absolutely need to have new information, and a fake is by nature new, you won't read it anywhere else," he said.

He also noted that while some users shared his post knowing it was a joke, the amplification propelled it into a realm where many interpreted it literally.