Oliver Haslam on July 20, 2024, 7:04 pm

CrowdStrike Broke The World Because Of The Way Its Cyber Security Tool Works

The world was effectively brought to its knees thanks to a number of industries suffering huge technological issues on Friday with a software update rolled out by cyber security firm CrowdStrike found to be the problem.

But how did it manage to cause such huge issues?

Airlines, airports, banks, retailers, and businesses found that they were unable to use their computers while others were unable to access key services that they rely on Friday after CrowdStrike pushed an update out to its clients that effectively caused Windows computers and servers to be stuck in a boot loop.

The issue was twofold, with CrowdStrike’s ubiquity a key factor. As Bloomberg reports, the company’s cyber security tools are used by some of the biggest companies on the planet, ensuring that few people went about their day on Friday without being impacted by the outage in some way.

The other issue is the way CrowdStrike’s software works. Because it hooks into the computer’s underlying software to provide real-time security and antivirus measures, any issues were bound to result in considerable issues.

Bloomberg reports that CrowdStrike offers endpoint detection and response for its client machines.

But to do this, these programs have to be given access to inspect the very core of the computers’ operating systems for security defects. This access gives them the ability to take disrupt the very systems they are trying to protect.

Notably, the issue didn’t affect Macs or machines running Linux but was catastrophic for those powered by Windows. Now that a fix is being rolled out CrowdStrike and its customers will no doubt hope that things can start to return to normal as quickly as possible.