Many organizations have experienced technical difficulties due to a faulty Crowdstrike update.

A large-scale computer outage. This Friday, July 19, several organizations around the world were paralyzed by technical difficulties. Although the press initially mentioned Microsoft, another company admitted to being at the origin of the problem, Crowdstrike.

· Many organizations affected

The disruption, which was first detected in Australia and New Zealand, had serious consequences for many organisations, starting with airports, which were particularly affected.

Flights suspended, baggage problems… airports in Spain, Berlin and Amsterdam have been paralysed. In France, airlines such as Air France, Transavia and Ryanair have also reported difficulties.

Television channels such as Sky News in the UK, Cnews and TF1 in France, and operators Sosh, Bouygues and Orange were also affected.

In addition to these organizations, IT disruption also interrupted operations of the 2024 Olympic Games, a few days before the opening ceremony.

· It is not a cyber attack

While several people thought that this outage was linked to a cyber attack, the possibility of a hack has been ruled out. “Nothing as it stands” suggests a “cyber attack,” said the French Information Security Agency (ANSSI).

For its part, the Government Center for Surveillance, Alert and Response to Computer Attacks (CERT-FR) indicated that the interruption affected “devices equipped with Windows and Crowdstrike Falcon EDR”, which caused “a blue screen of the system that caused a reboot of the workstation”.

· Mass coup responsible

Microsoft, which was initially held responsible, was also a victim of this disruption. The company faced technical difficulties affecting the Microsoft 365 suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.). Many users were therefore unable to use the services and applications of this suite.

“We are aware of an issue affecting Windows due to a software platform update. We hope a resolution will be found soon,” Microsoft said in a statement.

On Twitter, the company said the software platform in question was Crowdstrike Falcon Sensor, which is owned by cybersecurity specialist Crowdstrike.

Through the voice of his boss, George Kurtz, he acknowledged the existence of a “malfunction”. In detail, the problem stems from a faulty update sent within the Crowdstrike Falcon platform, which allows data to be protected in the cloud from the cloud. The latter is implemented within Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

Crowdstrike has announced the deployment of a patch in the hopes of returning things to normal, which could take several hours.

This disruption, which is currently being resolved, is unprecedented in its scale. While businesses have suffered global outages before, none had had such severe consequences.