The biggest IT disaster in human history
As you probably already know, last Friday there was a global IT outage as airports, banks, shopping malls and more were brought to a standstill. This marks the biggest IT disaster in human history.
Fortunately, MyWork does not use CrowdStrike for our cybersecurity, so our clients should be unaffected.
So what happened?
CrowdStrike is a US cybersecurity company that offers ransomware, malware and internet security products almost exclusively to businesses and large organisations. On Friday, they released a sensor configuration update designed to target malicious system communication tools in cyber attacks. This particular update triggered a “logic error” that resulted in an operating system crash on Windows systems
The company said the update, designed to target malicious system communication tools in cyber attacks, triggered a “logic error” (effectively a coding error) that resulted in an operating system crash on Windows systems. On Friday, millions of Windows PC users reported seeing a “Blue Screen of Death” on their devices, with many computers going into a reboot loop.
The good news is that it was not a cyber-attack, and the whole thing was caused by a faulty software update. The bad news is that a single point of failure caused a global technology meltdown. For a cybersecurity firm like CrowdStrike, the damage to their reputation is about as bad for them as the outage was for their customers.
Fortunately, there is a fix and most affected businesses have already rolled it out and restored their services. If you have been affected, reach out. We can refer you to our IT support partner who can help get you back online.