On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines across the globe, is linked to just one software company: CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike plays an important role in helping companies find and prevent security breaches, billing itself as having the “fastest mean time” to detect threats. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike’s valuation was upwards of $83 billion. It also has around 29,000 customers, with more than 500 on the list of the Fortune 1000, according to CrowdStrike’s website. But that popularity put it in the position to wreak havoc when something went wrong, with systems using CrowdStrike and Windows-based hardware falling offline in droves this morning. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on Friday that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” while emphasizing that the issue isn’t linked to a cyberattack. It also doesn’t affect Mac or Linux machines. The July 19th outage is tied to CrowdStrike’s flagship Falcon platform, a cloud-based solution that combines multiple security solutions into a single hub, including antivirus capabilities, endpoint protection, threat detection, and real-time monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to a company’s system.
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