Last week, we saw one of the biggest internet outages to date. It affected people across the globe and many had to face the dreaded blue screen of death on their PCs. This brought a lot of industries to a standstill, including leading banks across the world, flights got delayed, airports couldn’t function properly, and there were long lines everywhere. The culprit behind this? CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike, which provides its Falcon software to millions of Windows systems, is used by major corporations and airports. After facing so much backlash, the company has finally found out why all this happened. After conducting research on the issue, the global outage has been traced back to a faulty update.
Also read: Cybersecurity platform Crowdstrike down worldwide, many users logged out of systems
The company says that the issue comes from a bug in their test software. Because of the bug, the software failed to validate a content configuration update that was distributed to millions of devices. Instead of getting the data on new threat techniques, the new update ended up causing critical failures in Windows systems globally. It caused utter chaos, to say the least.
Further CrowdStrike says that it will enhance its update protocols so that these things don’t happen again. It will put in place more rigorous testing procedures and implement staggered deployments for updates to avoid similar widespread disruptions.
So it was a bug that caused all the drama. But hey, the drama doesn’t end here. Reports reveal that CrowdStrike tried to mitigate the damage by offering $10 UberEats gift cards to those who were impacted by this. But it turns out people were having trouble redeeming these cards too. Later CrowdStrike clarified that gift cards were intended to support “teammates and partners” who were assisting with the crisis. Uber had flagged these vouchers as fraudulent because of high redemption volumes.
