Global IT Outage Cause by Faulty Update from Cybersecurity Provider CrowdStrike

A global IT outage on Friday disrupted everything from airline operations to banks and 911 call centers.

According to CNN, the outage was not a cyberattack. Instead, the outage was cause by a fault update from major cybersecurity provider Crowdstrike on Windows-based systems.

Here’s more from the report:

The company’s engineers took action to address the problem, according to the advisory, which told customers to reboot their computers and perform other actions if they were still having technical issues. The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s main software products, and is not impacting Mac or Linux operating systems, according to the advisory.

CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by numerous Fortune 500 companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep-level access to a computer’s operating system to scan for those threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to be crashing because of the faulty way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system.

An additional CrowdStrike update was sent to machines with some able to be installed automatically. But many machines could take work from an IT professional to install the update and get the machine back and working

About the Author

Brent Dirks is senior editor for Security Today and Campus Security Today magazines.

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