The head of CrowdStrike, the company responsible for an update that took millions of people offline, said Friday the massive global outage was not a cyberattack nor a security incident.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on X "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. This is not a security incident or a cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolate and a fix has been deployed."
The update impacted Microsoft’s 365 apps and Azure service. It took major airlines, media organzations and even police forces offline around the world early Thursday evening.
One cybersecurity expert explained why the outage was so widespread.
"If there is a mistake happening here, it's cascaded, because the nature of the cloud is you don't do it computer by computer, you deploy it to all of the computers at the same time," said Ahmed Banafa, San Jose State University cybersecurity professor. "If with this software update there is a problem and it's conflicting, this is what's going to happen."
CrowdStrike is based in Austin, Texas, and has offices in Sunnyvale, California.
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