Many global disruptions continue to occur due to the CrowdStrike outage on Friday. This unanticipated incident has forced the suspension of several corporate activities, underscoring the critical role cybersecurity systems play in our digitally interconnected society. While businesses endeavor to tackle the aftermath, let’s scrutinize the specifics of this extensive occurrence.
An issue with the company’s Falcon Sensor upgrade, a vital component of their cybersecurity suite, triggered the CrowdStrike outage. Numerous system problems were caused by this flawed update, which mostly affected Windows-based computers. The problem manifests as a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which keeps the impacted PCs stuck in a recovery cycle and prevents them from starting up correctly.
CrowdStrike, a leading provider of endpoint protection and threat intelligence, quickly acknowledged the problem. They reported receiving many alerts about Windows host crashes related to their Falcon Sensor across multiple versions. The company has since identified the root cause and started the process of rolling back the troublesome update globally.
CrowdStrike outage affects even Microsoft globally
The CrowdStrike disruption has far-reaching implications for several industries. It is harming firms in a wide range of industries throughout the world. Banks, airlines, television broadcasters, and supermarkets are among the numerous companies affected by this technological difficulty.
Telstra, an Australian telecommunications firm, claimed failures in some of its systems as a result of worldwide issues impacting CrowdStrike and Microsoft. As companies around Europe began their working days, difficulties arose. Sky News, a British broadcaster, was unable to transmit its morning news broadcasts and had to apologize for the inconvenience.
BREAKING: Businesses including banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets have been taken offline following a mass global outage.
🔗 Read morehttps://t.co/JOhk3lwVq7
— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 19, 2024
The aviation industry was particularly affected by the CrowdStrike outage. Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines, announced that it was experiencing a “third-party” IT issue affecting flight departures. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration reported that Delta, United, and American Airlines flights were halted due to a “communication problem”. Even Berlin Airport warned passengers of possible delays due to technical problems.
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
TENED EN CUENTA: pic.twitter.com/IhypaH5nVO— Ryanair España (@Ryanair_ES) July 19, 2024
How to solve CrowdStrike outage?
IT workers throughout the world are facing a tremendous problem. The CrowdStrike outage has rendered a considerable chunk of several businesses’ computers inoperable and trapped in boot loops. Some businesses indicate that their whole network is down, while others say up to 70% of their computers are useless.
CrowdStrike has provided a workaround for affected machines, but implementing it on a large scale presents its own challenges. Here’s what you should do if you are also affected by the CrowdStrike outage:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
- Go to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
- Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”
- Delete that file
- Boot the host normally
This procedure can be particularly troublesome for cloud-based servers or remotely deployed Windows laptops. While CrowdStrike works diligently to resolve the issue and support affected customers, the incident raises questions about the potential vulnerabilities inherent in widely adopted security solutions.
X user named sxchopea declared today as International Blue Screen Day.
happy international bluescreen day😍 pic.twitter.com/caAvytQyS9
— sxchopea (@sxchopea) July 19, 2024
Microsoft’s global outage counterpart
While the CrowdStrike outage continues to cause significant damage, Microsoft has successfully resolved a major cloud services outage that occurred simultaneously. The Microsoft outage predominantly affected consumers in the Central US region. It even caused issues with various Azure services, including the Microsoft 365 application suite. Users reported delays in service management activities, network issues, and limited availability of various cloud-based products. Microsoft Teams was also disrupted, severely impacting enterprise operations for many companies. Many companies inevitably suffered.
We can say that Microsoft responded quickly to the outage. The issues were detected and within a few hours, they announced that they had recovered most of the affected services. However, they noted that a small subset of services may still experience lasting impact and some customers in the affected area may continue to experience issues. As the dust settles on the CrowdStrike outage, organizations will likely now have backup security measures in place.
Featured image credit: CrowdStrike
