It is called CrowdStrike and is the cause of the collapse of half the planet that uses Microsoft, including airport services like Aena, health services like Osakidetza, banking services like Visa and Bizum, and banks like Caja Rural, all in Spain. But the outages have also spread to the London Stock Exchange and to other services in countries such as the United States and Australia, which, along with Spain, have been the hardest hit.
The 'Blue Screen of Death' (BSOD) that the Spanish woke up to and some Americans went to bed with appears to have been caused by the latest update to CrowdStrike's Falcon cloud security platform. Falcon, a leading cloud cybersecurity solution, provides many organizations with advanced threat detection and response capabilities to protect their IT infrastructure. However, this update contained a bug that caused BSOD errors when installed on Microsoft Azure and Windows environments.
Initially, a normal reboot of the computer should have restored the normal operation of the entire infrastructure. However, after the computer rebooted, the system went into a loop of reboots, displaying the same screen repeatedly with nothing to do. Such was the extent of the "destruction" that Sky News announced on social media that it was "unable to broadcast live this morning, telling viewers that it was unable to broadcast live this morning, telling viewers that it was unable to broadcast live this morning.
In the case of Aena, there are hundreds of photos of airports in Spain whose screens are off. The DownDetector platform shows problems in the services of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Store, Microsoft Azure, Visa, Banco Santander, Kutxabank, Unicaja, Movistar, Instagram, Spotify, and other large companies both in Spain and worldwide.
During the afternoon, the situation improved thanks to CrowdStrike's work. CrowdStrike released a patch that solved the problem after George Kutz, the company's CEO, clarified that the bug was not due to a gap in the system's security but to a "specific bug in the latest update" and assured customers that the security of their systems had not been compromised.
Nonetheless, the markets punished the system crash, and CrowdStrike's shares fell sharply as investors reacted to the potential long-term impact of the incident.
