POMPANO BEACH, Fla. – CrowdStrike took responsibility Friday for a massive outage that exposed the fragility of information technology systems.
The cybersecurity software firm also reported the “malicious activity” during the event included opportunistic fraudsters posing as CrowdStrike employees.
George Kurtz, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, released a statement attributing the outage to “a single content update” for the Falcon sensor, designed to block attacks.
“The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack,” Kurtz wrote in a statement.
Only Microsoft Windows hosts were affected. This was enough to impact airlines, airports, hospitals, service plazas along the Florida Turnpike, and other sectors that depend on digital systems.
Ben Gonzalez, information technology security engineer at Local 10 News, said he started working to figure out the problem at about 2 a.m.
“This was not a cyberattack even though from the very beginning it looked like that because it was so widespread across different computers,” Gonzalez said.
CrowdStrike later announced a fix was deployed to restore customer systems.
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