CNN News
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A global computer outage that affected airports, banks and other businesses on Friday appeared to be largely caused by a software update issued by major US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN.
CrowdStrike notified customers Friday morning that the outage was caused by “a flaw discovered in one of its software content updates on Microsoft Windows operating systems, according to a post on X from CEO George Kurtz.
Kurtz later apologized to customers on Friday, saying the company was “deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” he wrote in X.
He reiterated that the outage was not caused by a security breach or cyberattack and asserted that CrowdStrike customers were “fully protected.”
“We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and running and they can provide the service their customers expect,” Kurtz said, noting that the outage was not malicious.
The company’s engineers are taking action to resolve the issue, according to an advisory seen by CNN, which asks customers to restart their computers and take other actions if they are still experiencing technical issues. The issue is specific to Falcon, one of CrowdStrike’s main software products, and does not affect Mac or Linux operating systems, the advisory said. Crowdstrike said Falcon is designed to protect files stored in the cloud.
CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by many Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep access to a computer’s operating system to scan for threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appeared to crash because of an error in the way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike interacted with Windows systems.
The company said the outage was not caused by a security incident or cyberattack. Kurtz, in his post, said the issue had been identified and isolated, and engineers had deployed an update to fix the problem.
CrowdStrike (CRWD) shares fell 9% in afternoon trading.
This major cybersecurity company does business worldwide through software sales and major hack investigations.
The company also helps run cybersecurity investigations for the U.S. government. For example, CrowdStrike has been tracking North Korean hackers for more than a decade, the company said. It was also tasked with tracking the hacking group that carried out the 2014 Sony Pictures breach.
But CrowdStrike is perhaps best known for investigating the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 US election. CrowdStrike has been at the center of false conspiracy theories since 2016, especially after White House transcripts revealed former President Donald Trump mentioned Crowdstrike in his July 2016 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to his first impeachment.
CrowdStrike was the first to publicly sound the alarm about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and its assessment was later confirmed by US intelligence agencies.
This story has been updated with additional context.
