The CEO of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, George Kurtz, has issued an apology following a global outage that impacted various industries worldwide. In an interview on Friday, Kurtz explained that the company had implemented a solution for the technical issue that led to the widespread disruption, affecting sectors from airlines to banking and healthcare. Separately, Microsoft announced that it had addressed the root cause of the outage affecting its 365 apps and services, including Teams and OneDrive, although some residual effects continued to impact certain services.
Kurtz clarified on the social media platform X that this was not a security incident or cyberattack, but rather a problem that had been identified, isolated, and fixed. The issue originated from a flaw in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts, according to Kurtz. Notably, Mac and Linux hosts were unaffected by this problem. On Friday, a significant IT outage was causing operational disruptions across multiple industries, with major airlines grounding flights, some broadcasters going off-air, and various sectors experiencing system issues.
Crowdstrike's 'Falcon Sensor' software was identified as the cause of Microsoft Windows crashing and displaying the infamous 'Blue Screen of Death,' as alerted by Crowdstrike to its clients. The travel industry suffered particularly severe consequences, with airports worldwide reporting delays and network issues, while banks and financial institutions from Australia to India and South Africa informed clients about service disruptions.
