A fault with an update issued by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to a cascading effect among global IT systems Friday, with industries ranging from banking to airlines facing outages.<\/p>\n
Banks and health care providers saw their services disrupted and television broadcasters went offline as businesses worldwide grappled with the ongoing outage. Air travel has been hit hard, too, with\u00a0planes grounded\u00a0and services delayed.<\/p>\n
At the heart of the issue is the Texas-based cybersecurity vendor\u00a0CrowdStrike. On Friday, the cybersecurity firm\u00a0experienced a major disruption\u00a0following an issue with a software update.<\/p>\n
So what happened, exactly? CNBC takes a look.<\/p>\n
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity vendor that develops software to help companies detect and block hacks. It is used by many of the world\u2019s Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, health care and energy companies.<\/p>\n
CrowdStrike is what\u2019s known as an \u201cendpoint security\u201d firm as it uses cloud technology to apply cyber protections to devices that are connected to the internet.<\/p>\n
This differs from alternative approaches used by other cyber firms, which involve applying protection directly to backend server systems.<\/p>\n
On Friday, people around the world began encountering an error screen known as the \u201cblue screen of death.\u201d<\/p>\n
This issue \u2014 a common problem among PCs, for example if a machine overheats \u2014 was the result of an update from cybersecurity firm\u00a0CrowdStrike\u00a0concerning its Falcon product.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Falcon is a platform developed by the company that\u2019s designed to stop cyber breaches using cloud technology \u2014 it is at the heart of the firm\u2019s focus on endpoints. CrowdStrike said Friday it is in the process of rolling back the update globally.<\/p>\n
CrowdStrike\u2019s software requires deep access to a computer\u2019s operating system to scan for threats. In the case of Friday\u2019s outage, machines running Microsoft\u2019s Windows operating system crashed due to a fault in the way a software update issued by CrowdStrike interacted with Windows.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD [blue screen of death]) and get stuck in a restarting state. We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July,\u201d Microsoft said in an update at 5:40 a.m. ET.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can confirm the affected update has been pulled by CrowdStrike. Customers that are continuing to experience issues should reach out to CrowdStrike for additional assistance,\u201d the company added.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Microsoft said its cloud services had been\u00a0restored after an outage\u00a0that affected its Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps in the central U.S. region. A company spokesperson said these are two different and non-related issues \u2014 one issue relates to Azure, the other is linked to CrowdStrike.<\/p>\n
They added that they \u201canticipate a resolution is forthcoming,\u201d in respect to the CrowdStrike problem.<\/p>\n
CrowdStrike is \u201cactively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,\u201d CEO George Kurtz said Friday in a update on the social media platform X. He added that Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,\u201d\u00a0Kurtz said.<\/p>\n
That fix could be hard to implement, though. Andy Grayland, chief information and security officer at threat intelligence firm\u00a0Silobreaker, said that in order to implement a fix, engineers would have to go into each individual data center running windows.<\/p>\n
They\u2019d then have to log in, navigate to a certain CrowdStrike file, delete it, and then reboot the entire system, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere machines are encrypted, complex encryption keys also need to be entered manually. Unless Microsoft and CrowdStrike (if they are involved) pull something miraculous out of the bag, this could be painful to recover from.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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