Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company which produces antivirus software.
It is believed to be the company behind Friday’s mass worldwide IT outage currently impacting banks and airports, and broadcasters, including Sky News.
Crowdstrike issued a software update, which appears to have failed spectacularly, according to reports.
The update is impacting Windows devices, causing PCs to show the “blue screen of death” and enter recovery mode.
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More: Major international IT outage impacting broadcasters, banks and airports, including Sky News
Senad Arun, founder of cyber research company Imperum, described the incident as “Crowdstrike Doom’s Day”.
Online forums are reporting Crowdstrike has issued an advisory with a URL which includes the text: “Tech-Alert-Windows-crashes-related-to-Falcon-Sensor-2024-07-19″. However, it is behind a regwall, which only customers can access.
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In a post on its website, Crowdstrike said: “Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows related to the Falcon Sensor.”
It said symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. It added that CrowdStrike engineers were working on the issue.
We’re currently experiencing disruption across the network due to a Global 3rd party IT outage which is out of our control. We advise all passengers to arrive at the airport at least 3 hours before their scheduled departure time.
— Ryanair (@Ryanair) July 19, 2024
Cont’d in comments…
Falcon Sensor is an agent, which according to CrowdStrike, blocks attacks on systems while capturing and recording activity as it happens, in order to quickly detect threats.
However, it currently appears that Falcon Sensor is the threat to IT systems.
