Here’s hoping you didn’t need to catch a flight last Friday, because the CrowdStrike catastrophe meant that planes were going nowhere.
Airports everywhere were sent into meltdown – along with just about everything else that relies on a Microsoft back end – after a software update issued by US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crippled computer systems across the world.
Flights were grounded, banking systems went down, and shoppers were left stranded with trolleys full of groceries when Microsoft systems crashed worldwide after a ‘logic error’ in the update occurred.
We even heard about the Blue Screen of Death for the first time in what seemed like ages.
It was a bad day for CrowdStrike CEO and founder George Kurtz, whose net worth was estimated to have dropped by a whopping $300 million in the wake of the disaster.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz posted on X in the wake of the shutdown.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
Spare a thought for their Melbourne-born president Mike Sentonas as well – who once warned the Australian government about relying “too heavily on tech”.
Sentonas told the Aussie government they should be concerned about the threat of hacks from foreign adversaries, not because he thought his own company was about to bring the internet to a grinding halt.
But it does raise some interesting questions.
Are we now too reliant on tech?
And what does it say about society when one line of dodgy code can cause entire systems to collapse?
Fortunately, many of our Microsoft-based clients didn’t report any issues – probably because they’ve got great back-up systems and decent cybersecurity in place.
But the CrowdStrike catastrophe is a reminder of all the things that can go wrong with our huge reliance on cloud-based technology.
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