CrowdStrike Blames Faulty Update for Global IT Outage, Affecting 8.5 Million Devices and 46,000 Flights

Jul 24, 2024, 09:30 AM

CrowdStrike has attributed last Friday's global IT outage to a faulty update. The incident, which affected 8.5 million Windows devices, caused widespread disruptions across various sectors, including banking, aviation, and healthcare. The update led to Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors on millions of devices running Falcon Sensor 7.11+. The company clarified that the outage, which lasted 78 minutes on July 19, 2024, was not due to a cyberattack but a bug in the Content Validator used in their quality assurance process. This bug allowed flawed data to be deployed into production. The outage resulted in significant impacts, such as the cancellation of 46,000 flights and disruptions in emergency services, affecting even Delta flyers. CrowdStrike has since filed a FORM 8-K with the SEC and is implementing new checks to prevent similar incidents in the future. Measures include staggering the rollout of updates and providing customers with more control over updates.