Home > News

World Is Grinding to a Halt, Thanks to CrowdStrike Windows Outage

By Laura Tucker
Crowdstrike Update Windows Featured

The problem with Windows being the number one operating system in business is … that it’s the number one operating system in the world. When it goes down, business grinds to a halt. A CrowdStrike software update caused many Windows computers used by businesses to get the blue screen of death error message.

CrowdStrike Takes Down Businesses Across the World

A recent software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to a significant issue: many Windows computers used by businesses started encountering error messages. Problems were first seen in Australia, then spread to the United States and the UK. It’s brought flights from major airlines, such as Delta and United to a halt. By midday, there were at least 3000 flights cancelled.

Crowdstrike Update Windows Airlines Down
Image source: Unsplash

TV networks, banks, and health services were brought down as well. Both FedEx and UPS were affected, and both said there could be delays in packages set to be delivered on the 19th. The UK health secretary, Wes Streeting, posted to X to say UK hospitals were affected.

People are also taking to social media to post about difficulties they’ve faced at businesses. It was reported by many coffee consumers that some Starbucks were forced to close. Several people weren’t getting their daily java intake.

It would be impossible for this article to list all businesses that were affected. When a critical system like this fails, it can bring entire companies to a standstill.

CrowdStrike and Microsoft Chime In

CrowdStrike head George Kurtz posted to X that the issue was a single content update that only affected Windows hosts, not Mac or Linux hosts. He stressed that the issue was not a security incident or cyberattack and that it was identified and isolated. A fix has already gone out.

Kurtz also noted that CrowdStrike was pointing customers toward a support portal for the latest updates. CrowsdStrike recommends that affected businesses ensure that they’re speaking with CrowdStrike reps.

Crowdstrike Update Windows Blue Screen
Image source: Unsplash

Kuntz later explained that the incident was with Falcon content that was updated and that they are working with all customers who were affected to get them up and going again.

Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella chimed in as well but didn’t offer much in the way of information. He also posted to Twitter and noted that the CrowdStrike update was impacting IT systems globally. He added that Microsoft was working closely with CrowdStrike to give their customers guidance and support.

Adam Leon Smith, a Chartered Institute of IT in the UK fellow and cybersecurity expert, noted that some impacted businesses could see a fix that same day, but it may take longer for some other businesses, since the outage was so widespread.

This Windows outage serves as a stark reminder of the interconnected nature of modern business operations and the potential risks associated with software updates. Windows updates can have problems, too. Read on to learn how to fix them.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.