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Outage caused by CrowdStrike’s disastrous update affected 8.5 million devices

The global outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike on Friday affected some 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft said in a blog post.

The global outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike on Friday affected some 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft said in a blog post. The update triggered a blue screen of death, bringing systems used by hospitals, airlines, banks and other major services temporarily to a standstill. CrowdStrike said in its own blog post on Saturday that the update — a sensor configuration update — “was designed to target newly observed, malicious named pipes being used by common C2 frameworks in cyberattacks.” Unfortunately, for devices running Windows 7.11 and above that use CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, it instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash.” The total number of devices affected worked out to be “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” according to Weston.

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