What caused the CrowdStrike-Microsoft global tech outage?

A global tech outage Friday grounded planes, sent offices offline and disrupted multiple industries. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says it identified a critical problem in its software and is working to fix the issue. Justin Cappos, professor and cybersecurity expert at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, joins CBS News to explain what caused the outage and when things could return to normal.

[bassboosted]

I work as IT for a large software dev operation in Australia... PCs started to blue screen at around 3pm... by 4pm every single PC was down in every office in Australia... within 1 hour our team determined it was crowdstrike. Although still silence from Crowdstrike... our 5 man team war roomed and found and tested the fix... rolled out the fix to every 500+ Windows PC, window servers and virtual windows machine... the worst part was fix could not be applied remotely as all workstations was bricked... we had to 1 PC at a time physically in person to apply the our fix... while ours phones was going nuts with people going nuts cuz they can't work... i walked out of office at 12am... no food no breaks as a broken IT Support.... thanks to crowdstrike...

[jameslim]

The poor underpaid developer and tester will get fired. while their big bosses who imposed impossible deadlines will get away with massive bonuses. How world of IT works

[writerpatrick]

The "blue screen of death" is a standard term for it and has been for decades.

This is a situation where pretty much all their customers are large corporations. Small users didn't get the problem because they don't use the service. Microsoft products are widely used and when they have a problem it becomes known fast. IT admins also know not to implement Windows updates right away but wait a bit in case a problem shows up.

[This_Old_Man_Prays]

If this is actually a bad code problem and this happened because of a "Glitch". Then Crowdstrike has the power to do this on purpose and assuredly WORSE! Why in the hell does one company hold that much control and power over millions and millions of people and institutions around the world? Especially in my United States of America!

[samanthaw]

US company world security threat, why is no one asking this question? 🤔

[maigepresents]

Devs and QA's: we recommend phased deployment with performance testing and regressijn testing
Execs: thats really expensive
Devs and QA's: we told you
Execs: surprised pikachu face

[denisewilson]

So will all businesses who lost revenue or profit during this outage be compensated? It seems very irresponsible to install an update that was not tested first on a smaller scale. This is ridiculous and many companies and banks and people lost out on money. This has even affected the medical and pharmaceutical industry. They need to be shut down after everyone is compensated. This affected MILLIONS of people. You cant jyst say sorry and write this off, heads need to roll.

[boxertest]

When people get on neurallink expect this!

[bambangwaseso]

There's no one using crowdstrike software on their windows pc at my office thus we're pretty much unaffected yesterday.

[arzelaascoli]

Newscaster at 1:34 "I just have to ask if it's normal to roll out everything all at once."

SREs: "one of us, one of us"

[pccqppz]

When that manager only hires Indian students

[karenpigage]

Affected nearly every industry across the globe. Let that sink in. Have you tried to access your bank account?

[whathaveudoneday]

There's NO WAY Crowdstrike deployed this w/o TESTING, no way... which only leads down one path which I'm not going there....

[NTKCP]

My flight got cancelled yesterday due to this incident!

[morsemurraidh]

Whadya wanna bet someone forgot the ";" ?

[archstanton]

I used to work in IT. Can't help but imagine the nightmare of working IT for a large company right now, and every PC on the network has the blue screen of death. That's Stephen King levels of nightmare.

[denniswright]

Our county has be too dependent on computers is there any back up? NO! We are human beings not robots cell phone zombies are all over the place.

[gauravghale]

This is the reason updates should always be manual, NEVER AUTOMATIC.

[papa-dtcv]

Will this be Highest record fines event?

[jorgealvarez]

I had stressful day at work could not use my laptop for 6 hours because I was stuck in an endless blue screen loop and in first hours IT had no idea how to fix it