CrowdStrike's role in global IT outage explained amid widespread Microsoft Windows crashes
Crowdstrike is a tech giant that has been named in relation to the outage that has impacted Microsoft users around the globe.
CrowdStrike, the firm implicated in a global outage affecting Microsoft users, is a tech behemoth estimated to be worth £65bn (€77bn).
The exact cause, nature, and extent of the outage remain uncertain, with Microsoft's X posts hinting at an improving situation. However, escalating outages continue to be reported worldwide hours later - with multiple issues in Ireland.
Sky News was forced off air, and Britain's largest train company alerted passengers to anticipate disruptions due to "widespread IT issues".
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Dublin Airport and Ryanair are reporting issues, along with Transport for Ireland and NCT centres. Ryanair cautioned: "Potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global third party system outage."
BBC journalist Hugh Pym tweeted about a "major global IT outage affecting some GP booking systems", though it wasn't immediately apparent if this was caused by the same issue, reports the Express.
An X user shared a screenshot of an alert from CrowdStrike stating that the company was aware of "reports of crashes on Windows hosts" related to its Falcon Sensor platform. The alert was posted on a password-protected Crowdstrike site and could not be verified. Crowdstrike has been contacted for comment.
Crowdstrike, headquartered in California, describes itself on its website as "redefining security with the world's most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise".
The company "secures the most critical areas of risk" like endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data "to keep customers ahead of today's adversaries and stop breaches.
It states: "Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence on evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritised observability of vulnerabilities all through a single, lightweight agent."
The latest CrowdStrike update is causing a widespread issue resulting in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) boot loop globally. Many users are experiencing major outages due to this problem. As of July 2024, CrowdStrike stands tall with a market cap of £65bn.
Toby Murray, an associate professor at The University of Melbourne's School of Computing and Information Systems located in Australia, has suggested that a "buggy" update to one of CrowdStrike's products may have sparked the chaos.
He said: "CrowdStrike Falcon has been linked to this widespread outage. Falcon is what is known as an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform, which monitors the computers that it is installed on to detect intrusions hacks and respond to them."
Falcon was therefore "a pretty privileged piece of software" which is able to influence how the computers it is installed on behave, Prof Murray continued.
He said: "For example, if it detects that a computer is infected with malware that is causing the computer to communicate with an attacker, then Falcon could conceivably block that communication from occurring. If Falcon is suffering a malfunction then it could be causing a widespread outage for two reasons one: Falcon is widely deployed on many computers, and two: because of Falcon's privileged nature.
"Falcon is a bit like anti-virus software: it is regularly updated with information about the latest online threats (so it can better detect them). We have certainly seen anti-virus updates in the past causing problems. It is possible that today's outage may have been caused by a buggy update to Falcon."
Dr Harjinder Lallie, cyber security expert from the University of Warwick, said: "The worldwide IT outage experienced this morning is unprecedented in the range and scale of systems it has impacted. Although we cannot speculate on the cause of this outage just yet, it appears that this might be a server error emanating from one server supplier.
"This IT 'catastrophe' highlights the need for greater resilience, a greater focus on backup systems, and possibly even a need to rethink whether we are using the most resilient operating systems for such critical systems."
CrowdStrike has said it is “aware of reports of crashes on Windows… relating to the Falcon sensor.” Callers to the company’s technical support phoneline have been met with a recorded phone message saying they are aware of issues on Friday morning.
CrowdStrike has advised affected customers to log on to their customer service portal for assistance.
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