What is CROWD STRIKE?
The global IT outage experienced on Friday came down to a single software update.
The update to the Falcon sensor program, run by US company CrowdStrike, caused a coding error that sent millions of Windows computers worldwide to a "Blue Screen of Death".
What happened?
CrowdStrike is a US cybersecurity company based in Texas that offers ransomware, malware and internet security products almost exclusively to businesses and large organisations.
On Friday, July 19 at 4:09am UTC (2:09pm AEST), they released a sensor configuration update on their Falcon program that targeted Windows systems
The company said the update, designed to target malicious system communication tools in cyber attacks, triggered a "logic error" that resulted in an operating system crash on Windows systems (Mac and Linux users were not affected).
A logic error means a mistake has been made in coding, and has caused a bug that can then cause the program to malfunction.
How Microsoft linked in this global outage?
Microsoft said it had fixed the underlying cause for the outage of its 365 apps and services including Teams and OneDrive, but residual impact affected some services. This issue stemmed from a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts, Kurtz said, adding Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted by the issue.
When will Microsoft outage be fixed?
Chief Information Officer at identity security firm CyberArk, Omer Grossman, told Reuters (a publicly owned international news and information company) that even with the fix being implemented by CrowdStrike, some of the problems caused will likely take time to fix.
It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed the Blue Screen of Death, they cannot be updated remotely and the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days.
What did the Indian govt say?
Ashwini Vaishnaw , the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Electronics & Information Technology, posted on X that the ministry is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage.
