On July 19, 2024, the world faced a major technological disruption that paralyzed the work of companies in various industries. Apparently, the cause of everything was a faulty update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
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What is known about CrowdStrike
Based in Austin, Texas, CrowdStrike is a well-known cybersecurity company. Founded in 2011, the company offers cloud workload protection, endpoint security, threat analysis, and cyber attack response services.
Their Falcon platform is a well-liked option for companies of all kinds since it integrates managed threat hunting, antivirus software, and endpoint detection and response (EDR). But on July 19, things went wrong for them.
According to news and reports in social media, CrowdStrike’s recent update has caused a lot of blue screen of death (BSOD) crashes on Windows computers. Numerous businesses were essentially paralyzed by this critical error, which rendered computers unusable.
In addition, Microsoft also appears to have experienced a separate outage for its Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of applications. “Users may not be able to access various Microsoft 365 applications and services,” they wrote. It’s unclear what, if any, failures are related to this and not to the CrowdStrike issue.
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Why did the failure occur?
While CrowdStrike acknowledged the issue and rolled back the update, the exact cause of the crash remains unclear. Cybersecurity experts believe that the update itself may have contained a bug that conflicted with Windows systems.
The reaction of the two companies
Neither CrowdStrike nor Microsoft have officially confirmed a direct link between the update and the crash. CrowdStrike released a statement acknowledging the BSOD report and saying it was able to identify and reverse the problematic content deployment. However, the statement did not provide details about the cause of the failure.
Despite the fact that the fact that it’s unclear whether the two incidents are related, Microsoft is also looking into another service outage that occurred at the same time as the CrowdStrike problem.
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Consequences of global disruption
A global IT system outage, likely caused by a CrowdStrike update, has led to major disruptions and potential financial losses. Airlines such as Delta and Frontier were forced to cancel flights, while the London Stock Exchange and broadcasters such as Sky News faced disruption.
IT professionals around the world are feverishly trying to troubleshoot and restore performance, which emphasizes critical infrastructure dependencies on multiple software vendors.
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How to fix a blue screen error in Windows
•Boot into Windows in Safe Mode or in the Windows Recovery Environment
•Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
•Find the file called “C-00000291*.sys” and delete it
•Restart your computer or server
It is recommended to use this method while CrowdStrike is working on solving the problem and will not provide official information.
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