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The “blue screen of death” brought the world to a standstill last Friday. From aviation to health, elections to IT and banking, every sector was affected by the Windows crash. There was complete chaos and confusion while authorities grappled with the situation.

CrowdStrike acknowledged the crisis and accepted responsibility for the same. They have reached the conclusion that a buggy update, which was otherwise meant to protect Windows devices from cyber threats, has led to this terrible outage

CrowdStrike is convinced that this is not a cyberattack, as Linux and Mac systems are doing completely fine. However, the faulty update proved to be a nightmare for majority of the Windows users across the globe.

CrowdStrike has come up with a preliminary PIR or Post Incident Review whereby they have claimed that a defective Rapid Response Content Configuration update has created this global disruption. Rapid Response Content update is meant to protect software from the malicious advances of threat actors. 

A stress test was performed and nothing came up in the test results. So, CrowdStrike went ahead with the update. 

George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike was summoned by Congress. He and his team are required to save the brand’s reputation by taking swift and significant steps. Earlier, only a handful of people in the industry knew about CrowdStrike. Now every common man, business person as well as consumers are aware of the brand responsible for the outage.

 

CEO of CrowdStrike

 

In response, CrowdStrike has come up with remedial steps to alleviate the problem. For example, it is planning to design multiple tests to detect any kind of bug in the upcoming updates. They are also planning to add validation checking systems to the Content Validator for Rapid Response Content. CrowdStrike will also make some tweaks in the updates-deployment system.

CrowdStrike is hopeful that these mitigation steps will be enough to curb the impact of the Windows crash blunder. Also, they are affirmative about the efficacy of these measures in eliminating any kind of risk in future. 

Microsoft, the tech giant, has been looking into the matter closely and has assured that this Windows outage has nothing to do with the Azure outage. Also, as per their investigation, as many as 8.5 million Windows devices have been affected by this outage.

 

CrowdStrike outage

 

 

Impact of Microsoft outage across the globe!

Brands like Amazon, Target, Alphabet, etc. are the customers of CrowdStrike. The outage resulted in extreme confusion and chaos across these organizations. Banks, hospitals, airports, as well as government departments suffered a lot in terms of complete disruption. The blue screen of death hindered many day-to-day operations, resulting in delays, unnecessary arguments, misunderstandings, and whatnot.

The global economy suffered due to this abrupt halt. IT teams have been facing a hard time since Friday. They are manually booting the affected PCs, deleting the update, and restarting the PCs. Experts believe that this process may go on for days and weeks, especially in large companies and enterprises.

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