2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages
global computer systems outage
On 19 July 2024, the American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor security software that caused widespread problems with Microsoft Windows computers running the software. As a result, roughly 8.5 million systems crashed and were unable to properly restart in what has been called the largest outage in the history of information technology and "historic in scale".
The outage disrupted daily life, businesses, and governments around the world. Many industries were affected—airlines, airports, banks, hotels, hospitals, manufacturing, stock markets, broadcasting, gas stations, retail stores, and governmental services, such as emergency services and websites. The worldwide financial damage has been estimated to be tens of billions.
Within hours, the error was discovered and a fix was released, but because many affected computers had to be fixed manually, outages continued to linger on many services.
Background
CrowdStrike produces a suite of security software products for businesses, designed to protect computers from cyberattacks. Falcon, CrowdStrike's endpoint detection and response agent, works at the operating system kernel level on individual computers to detect and prevent threats. Patches are routinely distributed by CrowdStrike to its clients to enable their computers to address new threats.
CrowdStrike's own post-incident investigation identified several errors that led to the release of a faulty update to the "Crowdstrike Sensor Detection Engine":
Outage
On 19 July 2024 at 04:09 UTC, CrowdStrike distributed a faulty configuration update for its Falcon sensor software running on Windows PCs and servers.
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