CrowdStrike's Update Blows Up Computers

On Friday, CrowdStrike pushed an update to their Falcon security software that resulted in PCs around the world crashing with a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Even if an organization doesn't work with CrowdStrike directly, almost everyone felt some soft of effect as major cloud vendors and companies were brought down by the defect. 

Flight travel has taken an extreme hit as it was reported that there were over 46,000 delays and 5,171 cancellations on Friday. Delta Airlines continues to be crippled by the outage. As of this morning, Delta had cancelled 700 flights. In comparison, American, United, Alaska, Frontier and Southwest each have 40 cancellations or fewer over the same period. 

In the aftermath, the question becomes "How did this happen and how can it be prevented?" CrowdStrike's CEO, George Kurtz, said the update was a "content' update and they have been doing the updates the same way for many, many years. Even with that thought, one would think updates would be fully tested before pushing them out to 8.5 million devices. The problem is that the cybersecurity landscape is constantly changing and vendors need to get content pushed out as quickly as possible to prevent the ever-advancing cyber threats. In this situation, however, the update did more damage than a cyber attacker could have dreamt of. 

CrowdStrike and Microsoft have both released repairs and tools to recover from the update. Unfortunately, the tools require either many restarts per device, a physical USB drive, or a boot into 'safe mode'. None of these solutions are easy to deploy for IT Professionals and recovering from this fiasco is expected to take weeks. 

With this wide-spread outage, it will be interesting to see what happens to CrowdStrike. For now, it is obvious the industry is not happy with the company, as their stock price closed at roughly $342 a share on Thursday and currently sits at roughly $265 a share. An 11% drop on Friday followed by a 13% plunge today.