The whole world went into chaos on Friday thanks to an IT outage. Medical records couldn’t be accessed, flights couldn’t take off, all thanks to one update.
So, you’ve not doubted seen the outrage that came from an IT outage. The world erupted into chaos. Flights were grounded, health services were unavailable, and payment systems weren’t accessible. But, what caused this break in the system? Why was it so drastic?
The disruptions came from a cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike. They are responsible for software used by millions of companies worldwide. As silly as it sounds, there was an update made to one of their systems, and it sent the whole software into overdrive.
This lead to a collapse of the system. Any computer running Windows that also ran CrowdStrike was suddenly unable to operate. The Falcon Sensor had malfunctioned. But, believe it or not, the creator of the update isn’t to blame.
While they made the update, it isn’t their job to test it. It seems the team who are responsible for testing overlooked something and caused major issues in the long run. Major technology failures came from this, and it’s been recorded as one of the largest IT failures ever.
What is Crowdstrike?
An American company responsible for cybersecurity, CrowdStrike, was founded in 2011 in Austin, Texas. While it has only been around for 13 years, it has grown rapidly in this time and has become one of the most popular software companies.
With thousands of workers on board, and huge corporations using the software, there isn’t much room for failures. As we have all seen from the recent outage. According to CrowdStrike’s website, it protects 538 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
It’s market value now sits at around $83bn, however, thanks to Friday’s issues, the stock prices have now dropped quite significantly. By early Friday morning, the stocks had dropped by 13% and were looking to continue with this decline.
CrowdStrike was designed to block hackers or malware. It should be a safety feature within so many companies worldwide. The company was previously hired to investigate the Russian hack of DNC service, along with North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony Pictures.
How were CrowdStrike responsible for the IT outage?
CrowdStrike made an update to its marquee cybersecurity platform. This is a cloud-based software called Falcon. Essentially, they pushed a button to update the system, and it disabled all systems running on Microsoft Windows.
The malfunction size couldn’t have been predicted. The CEO, George Kurtz has apologised, saying it was down to a faulty piece of code. However, he reassured people it wasn’t down to a cyberattack or anything of a worrying nature.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz wrote on Twitter. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”
While things seem to be working again as normal, the outage has been listed as one of the worst ever. It shows us just how much we rely on computer software. However, while some have suggested we should go back to keeping hardcopies, this isn’t the best solution.
The likelihood of this type of thing happening is extremely slim, so it’s very unlikely it will happen again. Information wasn’t deleted or lost, it simply was inaccessible for the day. Which, of course isn’t ideal, but, returning to paper filing isn’t the answer either.
Of course, when we were a paper only society, things were misplaced or damaged quite often, and we simply don’t have the space to store thousands of patients medical files on paper for example. When, they can be retrieved within minutes thanks to modern technology.
