By If there’s one thing CrowdStrike really wants to make clear about the tech outage affecting thousands of businesses, it’s that it was not caused by a cyberattack.
“Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected,” CEO George Kurtz said in his latest statement Friday on the outages, which have affected more than half a dozen global industries. “We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.”
Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike on Thursday night issued a regular software update to its Falcon Sensor software, which is designed to protect against malware and “much more.” That update contained a defect, according to the company, which impacted Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
As a result, Microsoft users across the world were grappling with the “Blue Screen of Death,” posting pictures of their frozen screens online as they were left unable to access corporate laptops and computers. Microsoft also said a configuration change affected its Azure cloud service, which caused an interruption that affected its Microsoft 365 products. Clients across the U.S. were affected by the outage, which left businesses unable to access Microsoft 365 services like Office and Teams.
Read More: What to know about the massive global tech outage grounding flights, disrupting banks and more
More than half of Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike’s software, according to a promotional video from the firm earlier this year. As of March, at the end of the company’s fiscal year 2024, CrowdStrike had more than 29,000 subscription customers, excluding smaller customers served through its partners. It’s unclear exactly how many have been affected.
The issues have spread to the London Stock Exchange, banks, McDonald’s stores, and even U.K. public broadcaster Sky News. Downdetector, an online service that tracks user-reported outages at major companies, has recorded growing outages at firms like Starbucks, Ticketmaster, BetMGM, and UPS. Health centers across the world, including Boston’s Mass General Brigham, have been disrupted.
The outages have impacted more than 30,000 flights, according to FlightAware. Major airports like John F. Kennedy International and the Netherlands’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol have been affected, as have airlines like United Airlines and American Airlines.
“I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” Troy Hunt, a security consultant and creator of “Have I Been Pwned?,” wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
And, predictably, conspiracy theories about the outage are already flying.
Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist and former Republican candidate for Congress, commented on social media that it’s “weird” the outage happened as former President Donald Trump accepted his party’s nomination on Thursday night. She then noted that CrowdStrike’s chief security officer, Shawn Henry, used to work for the FBI, before asking “Why is every crisis in our country somehow tied to [former president] Barack Obama?”
Australian Senator Ralph Babet, who represents Victoria in the country’s senate, also pointed to Trump’s speech, writing that “the narrative and the news cycle has moved from Trump to CrowdStrike. Too convenient.” Babet recently called for the deportation of Tenacious D, the comedy rock duo of Jack Black and Klye Gass, over comments Gass made regarding the attempted assassination of Trump Saturday.
