Microsoft outage: CrowdStrike CEO explains the ‘logic’ that went wrong

A faulty software update from US-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused widespread disruptions on Friday, impacting critical services from airlines and banks to hospitals and stock exchanges. Millions of Windows computers worldwide were rendered inoperable for several hours, and may across the world still continue to.
In a blog post, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, has explained what exactly may have caused the global outage.The post also shares a how-to guide for customers to fix the issue. There’s also a root cause analysis. CrowdStrike emphasized that the incident was not a result of a cyberattack and that the issue has been resolved. Systems that downloaded the faulty update between 9:30 AM and 10:57 AM IST were most affected.
The ‘logic’ that went wrong in CrowdStrike update
“On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems,” wrote Kurtz.
The CEO claimed that the issue has been rectified, “The sensor configuration update that caused the system crash was remediated on Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC.”

The machines impacted as per CrowdStrike

“Customers running Falcon sensor for Windows version 7.11 and above, that were online between Friday, July 19, 2024 04:09 UTC and Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC, may be impacted. Systems running Falcon sensor for Windows 7.11 and above that downloaded the updated configuration from 04:09 UTC to 05:27 UTC – were susceptible to a system crash,” said the blog post.