IT outage caused by CrowdStrike update: CEO explains

NEW YORK (PIX11) — CrowdStrike’s CEO says, “The problem came from a bug that was related to an update.”

“A nice little day trip that turned into a horrific night.” There is no better way to describe what Tyonne Anderson has gotten through after she came to New York City for a day trip to treat herself on Wednesday.

“Just to get my hair done, get a massage and everything,” she said. She was supposed to return to Chicago on the same day, but her flight was canceled due to bad weather.

“The earliest day to rebook me was today, which was still two days later, and I get here this morning, and all flights were at a halt. And now they have rebooked me to leave on Sunday.”

She is frustrated, just like thousands of people across our region and worldwide who have been dealing with flight delays and cancellations. The reason for the largest IT outage in U.S. history. Obstructing Microsoft’s 365 apps and Azure service.

“We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue,” said George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, the company responsible for the global computer outage, explaining it was caused by a defect in an update to one of their security systems.

“As systems come back online as their rebooting, their coming and they are working and now we are working with each and every customer to make sure we can bring them back online,” added Kurtz.

The IT disruption impacted small independent businesses and big corporations,  including banks, media companies, and hospitals. Even billboards in Times Square went dark.

“This was not a cyber-attack,” stated NYC Mayor Eric Adams.

The mayor‘s office said it detected a minor issue with some cameras used by law enforcement agents. However, 911 and other critical services were not affected. The city is crediting good planning and practice.

“Our most critical services, 911 related,311, we isolate them in a separate environment, and we control which updates get pushed into that sector of the environment,” said Matthew C. Fraser – NYC’s Chief Technology Officer.

Companies affected by the outage were able to stay running either by going manual or running backup systems.

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