Microsoft outage: ‘Former Crowdstrike employee’ says his ‘little update’ caused global disruption, satire or real?

The global Microsoft outage on Friday caused many employees to hilariously celebrate the “Blue Screen of Death” Day with disrupted IT operations across services. With banks, airlines, media outlets and other institutions facing the worst end of the unprecedented worldwide IT lockdown, cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike later assured users that we weren’t under a malicious cyberattack. The widespread outages around the globe were believed to be linked to a software update gone wrong.

Hours later, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz released a statement, saying they had discovered the “defect.” “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz wrote on X/Twitter. “The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed,” he added, signalling how a corrupted content update for Windows caused the breakdown.