Microsoft Outage: CrowdStrike’s update affected almost 8.5 million Windows devices all over the world, says Microsoft

Everyone wants to know about the recent Microsoft outage and its effects on different businesses worldwide. The banking system, healthcare system, electronic media industry, and airlines have faced severe challenges in their operations during this global tech meltdown on July 18, 2024. As a result of this chaotic situation, most users blame Microsoft for the issue. However, this is not the case.

According to an official Microsoft blog, CrowdStrike, which is an independent cybersecurity company, released a recent software update. This update affected the overall IT ecosystem globally. The update triggered a logic error, resulting in a system crash and a blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems.

CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas. The company was co-founded by George Kurtz,who is a former chief technology officer at McAfee. CrowdStrike has emerged as one of the top cybersecurity companies, known for its effectiveness in detecting and mitigating advanced cyber threats. They are involved in many investigations and resolutions of high-profile cyber incidents. Following are the key features and services of this company.

• Threat Intelligence
• Incident Response
• Managed Security Services
• Cloud Security
• Falcon Platform

Read more about the impact of AI on cyber security in 2024.

It is not possible to solve the global tech meltdown in a few hours. CrowdStrike is taking many steps to swiftly respond to the incident by rolling back the problematic update and issuing patches to fix the bug. They are providing regular updates to users regarding this issue. Microsoft is also providing all updates to users through official channels. The close collaboration between these technology companies is very important to solving this outage and covering all their damages as soon as possible.

This is the biggest system outage in history, and not something they can just push a fix for.Thousands upon thousands of individual servers and desktops will have to be manually fixed one by one. Those with bitlocker encryption will have to retrieve and manually enter long strings of characters to recover, and in some cases, the bitlocker keys themselves are inaccessible. In this case, the more the organization cares about security, the worse the damage. This is quite possibly the most epic fail in technology history. Some experts have warned that it could take weeks for systems to recover from this outage.

Such an outage could happen in the future. To mitigate the impacts of such outages in the future, tech companies and organizations should consider implementing should implementing robust backup and disaster recovery system, conducting regular software updates and testing, and having incident response plans in place.