Texas-based CrowdStrike behind worldwide outages, grounded flights

A worldwide, cross-industry internet outage early Friday was caused by an error at Texas-based CrowdStrike, a company meant to prevent such crises.

Why it matters: The global meltdown that grounded flights and halted banking is a black eye for cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike , which has been trusted by U.S. federal security agencies and some of the biggest companies in the world.

• In Houston, airlines delayed flights at both George Bush Intercontinental and William P. Hobby airports on Friday.
• Harris Health System also canceled most outpatient clinic appointments, Texas A&M University canceled classes, and DPS and DMV services were halted.

State of play: CrowdStrike software is used by sectors including airline , banking, media and entertainment, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, state government and technology.

Catch up quick: The outage was not linked to a security incident or cyberattack, CrowdStrike said. It was caused by a defect in an overnight product update.

• A fix for the issue was deployed, the company said on Friday morning.
• The outage affected devices hosted by Microsoft's Windows operating system.
• CrowdStrike's Falcon sensor , linked with the crash, was "built to stop breaches via a unified set of cloud-delivered technologies."

State of play: CrowdStrike, which launched in 2012, is a publicly traded company that provides cloud security tools, endpoint security, incident response and threat intelligence products.

• Last year, it added a generative AI assistant for customers, Charlotte AI.

Between the lines: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency selected CrowdStrike in 2021 as one of the major platforms to support some of its security initiatives.

• The company was one of the first industry partners to work with a Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, launched to improve risk management across federal, state and local levels.

CrowdStrike's customers