CrowdStrike, a prominent cybersecurity firm, recently released an update that led to a significant global outage, affecting numerous systems across various sectors. The update, intended to enhance security, instead caused a widespread disruption by triggering a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on many Windows machines, leading to repeated recovery boot loops.
The impact was extensive, affecting critical systems in banks, airlines, broadcasters, government services, and healthcare providers globally. Notable institutions such as Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, the UK’s London Stock Exchange, and the US National Health Service experienced significant disruptions. Additionally, the outage grounded flights from major airlines like Delta, United, and American Airlines, leading to chaos in airports worldwide, including those in the US, Germany, France, and India.
CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, confirmed that the outage was due to a defect in a content update for Windows hosts. This defect was identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed. However, the root cause was traced to a kernel-level driver update, essential for securing Windows machines, which caused the disruptions. Affected users were advised to boot into Safe Mode or Windows Recovery Environment and delete specific system files to resolve the issue.
Coincidentally, a separate issue affected Microsoft’s services, causing an outage in Microsoft 365 apps and services. This was attributed to a configuration change in a portion of Microsoft’s Azure backend workloads. Microsoft has since recovered from this issue.
