As a result of the update, large corporations, banks, and airlines began to experience the “blue screen of death.”
Microsoft stated in a blog post that around 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the global outage that occurred on Friday as a result of a faulty update that was sent by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity service. A blue screen of death was triggered as a result of the upgrade, which caused the systems that are utilized by hospitals, airlines, banks, and other significant businesses to briefly come to a stop. Windows-based computers were the only ones that were impacted.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike are still dealing with the aftermath of the incident, despite the fact that the majority of the problem had been rectified by Friday afternoon. David Weston, the Vice President of Enterprise and Operating System Security at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post that was published on Saturday that the business is collaborating with CrowdStrike to “develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix for CrowdStrike’s faulty update.” AWS and GCP, which stands for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, have also been contacted by Microsoft to provide assistance.
In a post that was published on its own blog on Saturday, CrowdStrike stated that the upgrade, which was a sensor configuration update, “was designed to target newly observed, malicious named pipes that are being used by common C2 frameworks in cyberattacks.” Unfortunately, it “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash” for machines that employ CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor and also run Windows 7.11 or a later version of the operating system. According to Weston, the total number of devices that were impacted consisted of “less than one percent of all Windows machines on the planet.”