What is CrowdStrike and why is everyone talking about it amid Microsoft outage?

Microsoftreported a major outageon Friday (Jul 19), affecting countries including India, Australia, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. People using Microsoft Windows are seeing a blue screen on their laptops with the prompt, “Your PC ran into a problem.”

With this flash of message, the systems are pushed for a restart or shut down automatically. Tech giants like Dell Technologies have stated that the crash has been caused due to a recent CrowdStrike update.

The outage first affected Microsoft’s Central US region and crippled systems worldwide for numerous airlines, including America Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Allegiant and Sun Country in the US, as well as IndiGo and other Indian airlines.

Also Read |Global IT outage: IndiGo, SpiceJet, US airlines broadcasters, banks hit: What is down? What we know so far

The impact was not felt immediately, but eventually, 911 services weredisrupted for several states in the US. Furthermore,services at the London Stock Exchange were also hitand Sky News went off the air. Reports suggest the outages are linked to global cyber security firm CrowdStrike.

What is CrowdStrike and why is everyone talking about it amid Microsoft outage?

CrowdSrike is a cyber security platform that provides security solutions to users and businesses. Using a single sensor and unified threat interface with attack correlation across endpoints, workloads, and identity, Falcon Identity Threat Protection stops identity-driven breaches in real time.

Earlier this morning, the company warned its users that Windows systems are "experiencing a bugcheck/blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor," and said that its engineering teams are "actively working to resolve this issue."

Also Read |Facing 'Blue Screen of Death' amid Microsoft global outage? Here's how you can fix it

Apparently, an update to the Falcon software is what caused the outage and whilethe company rolled back the update numerous machines are still affected.

CrowdStrike’s software is one of the most popular and widely used ones, and as a result, there are numerous outages across platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft 365, Azure, Instagram, Visa and AT&T.

What is Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)?

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is a type of critical error screen that shows up on Windows operating systems.

It happens whenever the system crashes due to a severe issue that prevents it from working safely. When this error occurs, the computer restarts unexpectedly, and all the unsaved data is likelylost.

Users reported seeing the Blue Screen of Death error messages across banking institutions, supermarkets and media companies in the USas well. This has resulted in severalissues and even ledsome TVandradio studios to go offline, reported theGuardian.

(With inputs from agencies)