Late last week, there was a worldwide tech outage that affected everything from airports to banks to healthcare. Flights were grounded across the United States. So, what actually happened?
The source of all those problems seems to be a popular cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike and its flagship software product Falcon Sensor. Apparently a “defect” in an update to Falcon Sensor caused any Windows computer with the software to crash. Reports of IT problems began late Thursday and early Friday in Australia, and then became more widespread as the rest of the world began its working day.
Your personal devices probably weren’t affected, because most consumers aren’t using CrowdStrike software. However, CrowdStrike says it has 29,000 corporate customers, including half of the Fortune 500, 43 of the 50 U.S. states and eight out of the top 10 tech companies.
You can expect more discussion about this in the coming weeks, as everyone from governments to private companies try to determine how an issue with a single piece of software could cause so many problems.
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