In this video, TechTarget editor Jamison Cush talks about the CrowdStrike outage and who was affected by it.
The largest IT outage in history?
Yes, the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, was one of the largest IT outages in history, some called it a real manifestation of fears that computing users had at the end of the last century with the Y2K bug.
Here’s what happened: CrowdStrike, a security vendor offering the Falcon platform used by Microsoft and other companies to minimize cybersecurity risks, released a configuration update that contained a logic error, causing millions of Windows devices to crash.
According to Microsoft, approximately 8.5 million devices were directly affected. While that’s less than 1% of Windows-based machines worldwide, the systems affected were running critical operations.
Airlines were majorly affected, including Delta, United and American Airlines. They were forced to ground, delay, and cancel more than 10,000 flights worldwide.
Healthcare companies faced disruptions in appointment systems, while some states reported 911 emergency services being affected.
Multiple broadcast outlets were taken off the air, including Sky News.
Online banking services and financial institutions were inaccessible.
And public transit in Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, New York City and Washington, D.C., were also affected.
While CrowdStrike was able to identify and deploy a fix for the issue in 79 minutes, the recovery process for businesses is extremely time-consuming. Among the issues, with the problematic CrowdStrike update installed, the underlying Windows OS could trigger the dreaded blue screen of death, or BSOD, rendering the system inoperative using the normal boot process. In this case, IT administrators have to manually boot affected systems into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment to delete the problematic file and restore normal operations. In some cases, the process also requires physical access to each machine affected.
It is estimated that it could potentially take months for some organizations to fully recover all affected systems from the outage.
Were you affected by this outage? Share your experience in the comments, and remember to like and subscribe, too.
Tommy Everson is an assistant editor for video content at TechTarget. He assists in content creation for TechTarget’s YouTube channel and TikTok page.