Today, Friday 19th of July, a company known as CrowdStrike pushed an update out to many windows machines that they support with their Falcon antivirus software.
This software is in use by many companies throughout the world such as banks, airports, and healthcare services. This update turned out to be faulty and has caused many outages by “blue screening” computers and stopping various services from working.
The result of this is many companies being unable to take payments, airports grounding flights, GPs unable to create appointments and an array of other problems.
CrowdStrike CEO, George Kurtz, has released a statement to say that they are “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers”. They have pulled this update out of circulation but many machines that already installed it are still non-functional.
CrowdStrike have confirmed that this was an issue caused by themselves and not due to any kind of cyber attack on theirs or other systems.
If you have a machine effected by this, a couple of fixes have been suggested:
- Microsoft has said that multiple reboots appear to work at least as a temporary solution. As many as 15 updates have been reported to “fix” the blue screen.
- Rebooting the individual machines into safe mode has also been said to resolve the problem.
CrowdStrike are currently working with their many customers to try and resolve these problems.
If you have questions or concerns, feel free to contact Tapcast on 01386 792196.
