Let's roll back the time to July 2024 when the world came to a standstill due to an IT outage over the failure of Microsoft servers around the world. Flight services, banking sectors, medical services, stock exchanges, and even ATMs were among the key services that were hit by Microsoft Global Outage. After the outrage, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued a statement and pinned the blame of global digital chaos on CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity firm that also addressed the IT outages around the world and the 'blue screen of deaths'. Satya Nadella then wrote, "Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online." While the services are now restored around the world, CrowdStrike is still feeling burnt by its 'faulty update'.
For instance, Delta Air Lines has reportedly opened a new tab and has vowed to take legal action after it said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days and costed it $500 million. CrowdStrike has rejected Delta’s contention and has said that airline itself should be blamed for the disruption of flights. Earlier CrowdStrike also cut its revenue and profit forecasts in the aftermath of the faulty software update and said the environment would remain challenging for about a year.
Interestingly, CNN suggests that CrowdStrike will give customers about $60 million in order to compensate them. Despite the global IT outage, CrowdStrike informed investors on Wednesday that it still had a 98% customer retention rate following the incident.
In the meanwhile, CrowdStrike will testify before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on September 24 on the company’s faulty software update that caused a global IT outage. The cyber security firm will be represented by Adam Meyers, senior vice president for counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike. Adam will testify before the House Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection subcommittee.
What did CrowdStrike say about the Microsoft Outage?
During the global IT Outage, CrowdStrike had issued a detailed statement. The US firm's statement reads, "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack.
The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We are referring customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous public updates on our blog. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.
Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers. We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on. We assure our customers that CrowdStrike is operating normally and this issue does not affect our Falcon platform systems. If your systems are operating normally, there is no impact to their protection if the Falcon sensor is installed."
A separate suggested that Microsoft said the preliminary root cause was a "configuration change" in a portion of its Azure backend workloads. It caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.