The Global Blue Screen Outage of Friday is Linked to CrowdStrike: A Security Firm That Has Been Found and Don’t Forget

On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines across the globe, is linked to just one software company: CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike has a role to play in helping companies detect security breeches and prevent them. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike’s valuation was upwards of $83 billion.

The update in question seems to have installed faulty software into the core Windows operating system which caused systems to get stuck in the boot loop. Systems are showing an error message that says, “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” while giving users the option to try troubleshooting methods or restart the PC. Many companies, including this airline in India, use the old-fashioned way of doing things.

How Fast Can It Be Deployed to Fix a CrowdStrike Fix? Olejnik’s Story with The Verge

“Our software is extremely interconnected and interdependent,” Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, consultant, and author of the book Philosophy of Cybersecurity, tells The Verge. There are plenty of single points of failure, especially when software monoculture exists at an organization.

Getting things up and running is not easy, even though CrowdStrike has deployed a fix. Olejnik tells The Verge that this issue could take “days to weeks” to resolve because IT administrators may have to have physical access to a device to get them working again. Depending on the size and resources of the company’s IT team, how fast that can happen is dependent on them. “Some systems in certain specific circumstances may be unrecoverable, but I assume that the majority will be recovered,” Olejnik adds.

Rosenberg says that the areas of greatest disruption have been so-called “digital bottlenecks” which require communication between multiple different computer systems. He gives the example of the critical practice of cleaning, disinfecting, and sterilizing medical devices and patient care supplies. This is monitored through digital tools across several computers, to ensure that best practices are followed and the risk of potentially lethal infections is minimized.

As soon as it became clear that this wasn’t an isolated incident, it became apparent that it was not an isolated incident. A cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike had made a routine update to its Falcon antivirus product, utilized by companies ranging from banks to airlines to hospitals. All computers running the software on a Windows operating system crashed when the update contained a bug.

“The impact is massive,” he says. “It affects all aspects of modern digital health systems. Luckily for us, the computers in the emergency departments and the intensive care units didn’t take the CrowdStrike application upgrade, and so there was no impact on patient care.