Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz has explained what caused the biggest IT outage in history, affecting over 23,000 major companies and millions of computers.
A bug within a software update wiped out Microsoft’s operating system, causing tech chaos globally as flights were grounded, banks were taken offline and healthcare systems were disrupted.
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity software that is meant to protect against cyber attacks and outages.
READ MORE: From footy to petrol: How the outage impacted Aussies
“Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected,” Kurtz said in a statement.
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.
“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.
“As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts.
EXPLAINED: What we know about the global IT outage
“For the latest information that we will continuously update, please refer to the CrowdStrike website, my posts on LinkedIn, and my posts on X.
“I will continue to provide updates to our community and the industry as they become available.”
More than 23,000 companies are subscribed to CrowdStrike, with the estimated number of computers affected in the millions, tech expert Trevor Long told Weekend Today.
“[Crowdstrike] issued an update to the millions of computers that are within those businesses and that update had a bug in it,” Long said.
“So basically that brought those computers to a halt…they were unusable.”
READ MORE: Aussies stranded as flights hit by IT outage
The cybersecurity company will now have to roll out updates to fix the problem, however, small businesses – who do not have access to an IT department – will need to manually fix the issue themselves.
“Small businesses need to actually physically attend to those computers, big businesses have IT teams,” Long said.
“This is still going to take most of the day to really resolve.
“From a cyber-attack perspective, this just shows how exposed we are to one thing failing and bringing essentially the world to a halt.”
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