What is CrowdStrike and how did it cause a global Windows outage?

A global technology outage on Friday grounded flights, disrupted health services, crashed payment systems and blocked access to Microsoft services in what experts believe is one of the largest IT failures in history.

The cause of the disruptions originated from a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, which provides software to a wide range of industries. An update to one of CrowdStrike’s pieces of software, Falcon Sensor, malfunctioned, throwing a wrench into computers running Windows, leading to major tech failures around the world, the company said.

Here’s what we know about the outage so far.

What is CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity firm founded in 2011 and based in Austin, Texas. Since its inception, the company has grown rapidly as it began to offer a range of security services using cloud-based software. It has raised millions in funding from Silicon Valley powerhouses such as Google’s venture capital arm. It employs thousands of workers and services businesses in countries across the globe, boasting on its website that it protects 538 out of the Fortune 1000 companies.

The firm has become immensely successful over the past decade, with a market value of around $83bn at market close on Thursday, though its stock price was falling during Friday trading. CrowdStrike’s share value declined dramatically following the outage, dipping as much as 13% early on Friday.

While the company’s primary products are intended to block hackers and malware, CrowdStrike has also been hired to investigate major data breaches. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 tasked CrowdStrike with investigating the Russian hack of DNC servers, while Sony Pictures employed the company to look into a 2014 cyberattack linked to North Korea.

CrowdStrike’s investigation into the DNC hack also previously played a small but notable role in the first impeachment of Donald Trump and special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump, echoing a widely repudiated conspiracy theory that CrowdStrike was involved in an elaborate cover up on behalf of the DNC, nonsensically suggested the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, look into the company, a piece of the quid pro quo accusations against the US president.

How did CrowdStrike cause the global outage?

The global outage stems from an update CrowdStrike made to its marquee cybersecurity platform, a cloud-based software product called Falcon. When CrowdStrike pushed an update to the Falcon software, which interacts with other parts of computer systems and software like Microsoft’s Windows products, it caused a malfunction that essentially disabled those systems and their widely used pieces of software the world over.

Put bluntly, the software intended to protect against crashes and disruptions in vital computer systems ended up taking them down. CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, has apologized for the outage, which the company has stated was due to a faulty piece of code.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz wrote on Twitter. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”

Compounding the chaos on Friday, another outage also hit Microsoft’s Azure cloud services and caused an additional set of failures. Microsoft has stated that the two outages were unrelated , and that its Azure services were now back online. Kurtz meanwhile told NBC’s Today show that it could be “some time” before systems fully recover from the outage his company caused.