Elon Musk blames diversity efforts for the widespread CrowdStrike digital pandemic that stunted Microsoft services

What you need to know

• Microsoft services were recently impacted by a CrowdStrike bug, causing mass outages.
• While Microsoft and CrowdStrike have issued statements indicating the issue has been fixed, Elon Musk used the opportunity to throw jabs at the latter's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
• The billionaire and X owner indicated, "We just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems" during the incident.

On July 19, 2024, the world woke up to a digital pandemic affecting Microsoft services in networking and cloud computing. Experts and analysts referred to the CrowdStrike BSoD as the " biggest IT outage the world has ever seen ."

The issue was narrowed down to a faulty CrowdStrike kernel driver, but services have seemingly been restored after Microsoft repaired its Azure servers. CrowdStrike issued a separate statement acknowledging the bug and later confirmed it had issued a fix.

Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has been vocal about the mass outage affecting Microsoft services while tooting X's horn for remaining functional amid the chaos. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have been on Musk's radar, with the billionaire claiming it is just another word for racism .

Musk coincidentally replied to a CrowdStrike post on X from 2022, announcing its Gold partnership with Bright Network's panel on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Musk commented on the post by indicating, "Not very 'bright' right now, is it?" Perhaps correlating the mass outage to CrowdStrike's DEI initiatives (via Quartz ).

For context, Elon Musk has been under fire for his views on diversity, especially after indicating that the issues affecting Boeing's 737 Max 9 are directly related to hiring too many non-white pilots and factory workers.

While speaking to CNN in March, Musk claimed Duke University lowered its standards to foster more diversity. However, the university issued a statement refuting Musk's claims and indicated its standards remain the same and will continue to be based on merit.

While the CrowdStrike BSoD chaos might be behind us, Elon Musk recently shared on X that "we just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems, so no rollouts at all."

In other DEI news, Microsoft recently dismissed its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) team due to "changing business needs." In an internal email shared by the team's former lead, Microsoft's top executives were accused of "investigated and evidenced discrimination, harassment, and toxicity." Despite the highlighted changes, the company remains committed to diversity and inclusion initiatives.