The real reason CrowdStrike brought companies to their knees

July 20, 2024

By Kim Komando

Yesterday, you couldn’t miss seeing photos of the Windows Blue Screen of Death all over airport screens and news of massive problems hitting computers everywhere. Some consider it one of the largest IT outages in history. And it all started with a company you may not have heard about until now: CrowdStrike. (A few major news outlets inaccurately reported it as “CloudStrike.” Now you know better!)

Uh, what’s CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike is a Texas-based cybersecurity company with over 30,000 customers. Its main purpose is to protect computers, laptops and networks from hackers and cybercrime.

You may be thinking, “Just 30,000? That’s not a lot.” But CrowdStrike’s customers are huge companies that collectively have hundreds of millions of Windows PCs and systems. That’s why the problem they caused was so widespread — and devastating.

So, what the heck happened?

CrowdStrike pushed out a security update that sent Windows PCs and systems into a Blue Screen of Death reboot loop. That rendered any computer completely useless. In true IT fashion, CrowdStrike tried to reverse the update to stop the chaos.

In some cases, reversing the security update worked, and bringing those systems back online just took a reboot. Other machines, though, needed to be restarted up to 15 times. How’d you like to be the IT person in charge of doing that for an entire company?

More complex systems and networks weren’t so lucky; they may not be fully operational for weeks. Yup, a massive fubar. Here are some of the industries most affected:

• Airlines: Some 2,900 flights were canceled or delayed because of system failures.
• Banking and financial services: You can’t touch your money, make trades or check account balances.
• Health care: Think patient electronic health records and computer systems. Surgeries were canceled.
• Media and broadcasting: News outlets and television stations experienced interruptions in programming. (Ahem … not me!)

The harsh truth

CrowdStrike is the largest company of its kind. That’s why its customer base includes the likes of American Airlines, Delta and United, along with other major companies, such as Amazon. And an outage of this scale shows us all just how vulnerable we are to system failures, even in this AI-driven world.

Because CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company, it’ll have to release what really happened to its shareholders, and so the rest of the world will know, too. The CEO has assured news outlets it was not a cyberattack — just human error.

But isn’t it frightening, the power one company had to take down various industries and disrupt so many lives? Meanwhile, preppers everywhere are saying, “Told ya so. We’re ready!” If you’d like to know how to put together a tech prepper kit, hit “Reply” or let me know when you rate this issue at the end. I’ll do that in the future if enough folks say yes. I aim to please, after all.

‘Is it me?’ 

Use Downdetector: Enter the name of the website you’re having problems with to get real-time site info, including a live outage map and the most reported problems. Downdetector doesn’t monitor all websites; here’s a complete list.

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