Crowdstrike Outage: Everything you need to know!

Crowdstrike Outage occurred on July, 19th

This is something that’s affecting people worldwide with multiple companies having issues as well.  This is impacting all different types of businesses, when you talk about Airlines, you also talk about 911 services in some cases reporting outages as well and you’re even hearing of anecdotes of banks in other countries experiencing that, we don’t yet have reporting of banks in the United States being impacted by this, but this appears to be not just in the United States worldwide and across different types of Industries.

This is not a Cyber attack, this is a computer kind of SNAFU that happened, and just to kind of walk you through exactly what’s going on here, this appears to be an issue between Crowdstrike and Microsoft so, Crowdstrike for those aren’t familiar is a cyber security firm that basically provides businesses with a way to foolproof their systems from being hacked.

Apparently, what happened was that Crowdstrike was working on some sort of update, we just heard from the CEO in the last few minutes describing this as not a security incident or Cyber attack, so we want to repeat that again, it doesn’t appear to be a Cyberattack at issue here, but the reason why Crowdstrike is so instrumental to not just businesses here in the United States but around the world is because any sort of business that hires Crowdstrike to basically “foolproof” their systems, well they’re going to be incorporating that into their computers so if they get that it’s being being plugged into Microsoft computers

The blue screen of death

If there’s an issue with Crowdstrike, it takes down all of those Microsoft computers that are related to that the company saying Mac and Linux computers are not impacted but again this is very wi interesting because I think what happened was a lot of people this was happening in Australia Europe while we were all sleeping we woke up and we were like what’s going on but what people are finding is they’re getting on their computers or at the bank or at the airline and they’re seeing just a blue screen is that what’s going on

Well, the term for this is called the blue screen of death. We don’t know if we have examples that we can show on the screen right now. Still, we we’ve been seeing it even in our news rooms this morning so it’s basically this blue screen that has this prompt that says, “you’re having issues”, and they’re trying to figure out a workaround but that essentially bricks your computer. You are unable to log in now that’s scary for any person that’s just trying to log into their personal computer although it’s not clear if your personal computer has Crowdstrike, if it doesn’t have that Plugin or have that cyber security layer you likely won’t be affected because of the nature of what we understand this issue to be but for all these Enterprise companies which is translation for corporate customers that use this protection well that’s a major issue if you can’t log in you can’t print out the boarding passes to get people on their planes you can’t um you know as a bank teller even get fired up to help open up someone’s deposit account

This is a major issue Crowdstrike says that they have an is they they identify the issue they isolated and there’s a fix that has been deployed how long that fix takes to basically patch over all this we don’t know as it seems like anecdotes of these issues and Alles are still out there and when you’re thinking about it like 911 all of these things hospitals like time of the essence when it comes to this but you did bring up the Airlines and a lot of folks I have a good friend who’s on the way to the airport who’s texting me saying what’s going on with all these flights

Flights Cancellations

We have more than 500 cancellations and over 700 delays if things don’t start looking up soon the guess from most of the people here at Newark at least today is that that could get worse.  it depends on how quickly crowd strike can can address this issue which as their statement says they they’re trying to deploy this fixed how quickly they can do that we don’t know one thing we want to emphasize is that we’ve seen 911 issues in New Hampshire, they’ve been reporting that whether or not it’s tied to this remains to be seen But for those that are unable to access 911 do not try to call 911 to test it try to figure out other avenues maybe try a different carrier different type of phone to access them.

If you are in an emergency because yes we’re talking about people trying to get to flights but there are many serious emergency issues that as well that could be impacted by this just make sure that you’re trying to try other avenues quickly again they’re saying this is a technical issue and not any kind of Cyber attack this is not a security incident or Cyber attack that according to George Cur the CEO of Crowdstrike on all right let’s see what happens this day is going to unfold again

The FA has requested a ground stop because crowd strike agents have a bug that’s blue-screening computers until you boot into safe mode and remove the corrupted file

So it’s affecting banks, hospitals, IT crowd strike is the enterprise almost 10 times the expense of what

Possible Solutions

If you use an IT documentation platform, that kind of comes from a cache being out of sync with their login servers and so using Incognito and Incognito browser can kind of get them back In Sync.

• Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery EnvironmentNOTE: Putting the host on a wired network (as opposed to WiFi) and using Safe Mode with Networking can help remediation.
• Navigate to the %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
• Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
• Boot the host normally.