Major Cloudstrike Update Glitch Causes Global Windows Shutdown

Many important Windows systems experienced a ‘Blue Screen of Death’ (BSOD) globally after a Cloudstrike security update defect.

Earlier this morning, companies based in Australia have been detecting and reporting Windows OS BSOD’s, followed by disruptions found all over the globe. These disruptions caused forced mass flight groundings globally through US airports (including Delta, United, American Airlines, etc.), took the US News station Sky News offline, and even caused the Mass General Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, to postpone (or cancel) elective surgeries.

These widespread issues have been linked to Cloudstrike, a giant cybersecurity company responsible for rolling out security updates and detecting potential security risks or hacks for many major corporations. The issue is a defect in the update rolled out to the Windows OS platform and does not appear to affect others (such as Linux or MacOS) at the time of this post. Since outages have started, Delta Airlines has said they are resuming business as usual.

President & CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, issued a statement on X (formerly Twitter): “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified and isolated, and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels” and assure customers, “Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

What’s notable is although some services have resumed and issues appear to have cleared up in some spaces, Microsoft ‘s stock has dropped by $3 since the Stock Exchange opened today, and Cloudstrike’s stock has also fallen by a big 9-10% since the reports of outages started. It’s important to mention that although Cloudstrike has implemented a fix, the Founder of Ireland’s Computer Emergency Response Team, Brian Honan, told Forbes the fixes need “manual intervention to each individually impacted device, which could lead to a long recovery time from this problem.” So, some issues may be corrected faster than others.