The global computer outage affecting airports, banks and other businesses on Friday appears to stem at least partly from a software update issued by major US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN.
CrowdStrike told customers early Friday that the outages were caused by “a defect found in a single content update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems, according to a post on X from CEO George Kurtz.
Kurtz later apologized to customers Friday, and said the company is “deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” he posted on X.
He reiterated that the outage was not caused by a security breach or a cyberattack and maintained that CrowdStrike’s customers were “fully protected.”
“We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” Kurtz said, reiterating that the cause of the outage was not malicious.
The company’s engineers took action to address the problem, according to an advisory viewed by CNN, which told customers to reboot their computers and perform other actions if they were still having technical issues. The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s main software products, and is not impacting Mac or Linux operating systems, according to the advisory. Crowdstrike says Falcon is designed to protect files saved in the cloud.
CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by numerous Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep-level access to a computer’s operating system to scan for those threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to be crashing because of the faulty way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system.
The company said the outage was not caused by a security incident or a cyberattack. Kurtz, in his post, said the issue was identified and isolated, and engineers deployed an update to fix the problem.
CrowdStrike’s (CRWD) stock fell 9% in midafternoon trading.
What is CrowdStrike known for?
The massive cybersecurity company does business around the world through software sales and investigations of major hacks.
The company also helps run cybersecurity investigations for the US government. For example, CrowdStrike has tracked North Korean hackers for more than a decade, the company says. It also was tasked with tracking the hacking groups that carried out the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures.
But CrowdStrike is perhaps best known for investigating the Russian hack of Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 US election. It has been at the center of false conspiracy theories since 2016, most notably after a White House transcript revealed former President Donald Trump mentioned Crowdstrike in his July 2016 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to his first impeachment.
CrowdStrike was the first to publicly sound the alarm about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and CrowdStrike’s assessment was later confirmed by US intelligence agencies.