A bug in an update is to blame for Friday’s global technology outage that delayed thousands of flights, according to CrowdStrike.
The Associated Press reports today that the bug allowed CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity systems to push bad data to millions of customers’ computers.
The outage grounded flights around the world, put TV off air, disrupted banks, interrupted hospital services and stalled retailers.
Apparently, going forward, CrowdStrike will take measures to prevent another outage by staggering the rollout of updates and giving customers more control of when and where updates happen. The cybersecurity firm will also provide customers with more details about planned updates.
CrowdStrike posted a “preliminary post incident review” today of the global outage, and said the problem started with an “undetected error” in the content configuration update for the company’s Falcon platform. The error affected all computers operating with Microsoft Windows. “Problematic content data” was permitted to deploy to CrowdStrike’s customers as a result of the bug and created a Windows operating crash.
The Texas-based company said approximately 8.5 million computers crashed on Friday. After a full investigation, CrowdStrike will publicly release a full analysis of the outage.
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Rebecca Barnabi
