CrowdStrike incident and update

On July 19, 2024, a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to a significant IT outage worldwide. The update, intended for CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor software, caused millions of Windows systems to crash, resulting in widespread disruption across various industries, including healthcare, airlines, and financial services.

The issue stemmed from a configuration error that triggered a “Blue Screen of Death” on affected systems. Despite a quick fix being released, the manual nature of the recovery process meant that many services continued to experience outages.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform was also impacted, leading to further complications. The financial damage from this incident is estimated to be at least $10 billion according to wikipedia.

CrowdStrike has since issued a preliminary post-incident report and is working on measures to prevent such occurrences in the future.

The current status

In a post on LinkedIn, George Kurtz said "over 97%" of systems running its software were back online as of 25 July.