CrowdStrike on Wednesday released more details about what caused Friday’s attack. Technology haltcaused outages on Microsoft Windows computers around the world, disrupting airlines, hospitals, banks and other businesses.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike blamed the problem on a bug in a program meant to detect issues before software updates were uploaded to customers. The glitch meant that “problematic content data” wasn’t flagged before being sent to customers, CrowdStrike said in an update on its website.
The resulting bad data “could not be properly processed and caused critical errors that led to a Windows operating system crash (BSOD),” Crowdstrike said.Blue Screen” message appeared on the screens of affected computers.
CrowdStrike also said it would take steps to prevent similar outages in the future, including staggering the rollout of updates, giving customers more control over when and where updates occur, and providing more detailed information about planned updates.
The company said a “significant number” of the roughly 8.5 million computers that crashed on Friday were working again as customers and regulators waited for more details about what happened.
CrowdStrike said it would release a full analysis of the Meltdown once its investigation is complete.
The outage caused widespread technical disruption for days and highlighted vulnerabilities in corporate networks. It has attracted the attention of government regulators and lawmakers, including members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who have called on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify before Congress about the cybersecurity company’s role in the outage.
—Reported by The Associated Press.
