By: Alyssa Wan

On Friday, July 19th, a massive IT crash disrupted 8.5 million computers running on Windows software. Flights, banks, media outlets, and companies worldwide were all affected.

All this happened because of a “third-party software platform.” A third-party software platform is a computer program created or developed by a different company than the one that developed the computer’s operating system. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to thousands of companies worldwide, says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

“The outage was not caused by a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike said.

Not only did the IT crash affect computers but also transportation companies due to online system breakdowns. Over 1,500 flights were canceled worldwide. Some train companies had to inform passengers of delays and potential cancellations.

George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz said he was deeply sorry for the disruption. CrowdStrike’s chief security officer, Shawn Henry, issued a statement on LinkedIn further apologizing for the outage on Monday. He called the previous 48 hours the most challenging time in the dozen years he had spent at the company, saying that the company rapidly lost customer confidence it had spent ages earning.

“We let down the very people we committed to protect, and to say we’re devastated is an understatement,” Henry said in the post.

However, most schools seemed unaffected by the IT crash.

The next day, IT systems worldwide were back up and running.

Image Credit by Josh Sorenson