Heaptalk, Jakarta — On Friday (07/19), several countries experienced a global technology outage, which halted flights, disrupted healthcare services, disabled payment systems, and blocked access to Microsoft services.
The Guardian reported that the disruption was caused by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. According to various sources, CrowdStrike is a United States-based cybersecurity company founded in 2011 and headquartered in Austin, Texas. Since its inception, the company has grown rapidly, offering diverse security services using cloud-based software.
The company has raised millions in funding from Silicon Valley powerhouses, such as Google’s venture capital branch. The company employs thousands of workers and service businesses in various countries worldwide. Additionally, CrowdStrike claims to protect 538 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
The global outage stemmed from an update performed by CrowdStrike on its main cybersecurity platform, the cloud-based software Falcon. When CrowdStrike updated Falcon, which interacts with other parts of computer systems and software, such as Microsoft Windows, it caused a malfunction that essentially disabled these systems and widely used software worldwide.
In simple terms, the software designed to protect vital computer systems from damage and disruption rendered those systems non-functional. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has apologized for the outage. According to CrowdStrike, the issue was caused by a coding error.
“This was not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified and isolated, and a fix has been implemented. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide comprehensive and ongoing updates on our website,” wrote Kurtz on platform X.
Additionally, another outage also hit Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, causing a series of additional failures. Microsoft stated that the two outages were unrelated and Azure services had been returned online. Meanwhile, Kurtz mentioned that it might take time before systems fully recover from the outage caused by CrowdStrike.
