Botched CrowdStrike Update Triggered Microsoft Infrastructure Outage Overnight

Security firm CrowdStrike misconfigured a Windows security update, triggering a massive worldwide outage that impacted Microsoft’s infrastructure and a wide range of airlines, banks, and other businesses, including emergency services.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtx tweeted this morning. “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified [and] isolated, and a fix has been deployed.”

While many media outlets initially blamed Microsoft for the outage, the software giant was simply a victim as well, with many of its commercial and consumer services going down for the count overnight. I happened to notice this while I was configuring a laptop last night, as I couldn’t connect to my Microsoft account or Xbox.

But the problems were much more serious for others, including what will no doubt end up being millions of travelers who found themselves stranded in airports as airline systems failed. There were issues all over the world that impacted hospitals and healthcare services, banks, and businesses of all kinds.

As of this writing, the problem has been fixed, and Microsoft’s infrastructure is back online and mostly working normally, though the software giant says that some services related to Microsoft 365 might still experience some issues as the fix is deployed.

The question now, of course, is how a single security update delivered via a single company caused such widespread outages. Part of the issue is that CrowdStrike is so popular with cloud infrastructure companies: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are among its biggest customers. But the firm also counts many governments, industry giants, and other large corporations among its customers. And it’s likely that this event will trigger a bit of a rethinking.

And not just for CrowdStrike. This couldn’t have come at a worse time for Microsoft, which has faced withering criticism for its handling of a security breach that was clearly avoidable and seems to get worse with each passing disclosure. This is on CrowdStrike, not Microsoft, I think, but it is perhaps notable that only Microsoft’s infrastructure was impacted: Mac and Linux hosts, only the latter of which are used in infrastructure of any kind, were not impacted.