I've heard of Crowdstrike but now I'm super familiar since their IT part failed today all over the globe.  Grounded flights, hospital's down, 911 Emergency lines down and more.

CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by numerous Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep-level access to a computer’s operating system to scan for those threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to be crashing because of the faulty way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system.

The company said the outage was not caused by a security incident or a cyberattack. Kurtz, in his post, said the issue was identified and isolated, and engineers deployed an update to fix the problem.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/tech/crowdstrike-update-global-outage-explainer/index.html

Should Crowd Strike do more?

That means that if a company had a claim against CrowdStrike for the damage or lost revenue to its business, the most it could recover is just what it paid to CrowdStrike, according to Elizabeth Burgin Waller, the chair of the Cybersecurity & Data Privacy practice at Woods Rogers.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/insurance/crowdstrikes-terms-and-conditions-say-most-customers-would-just-get-a-refund-due-to-the-massive-outage-cybersecurity-lawyer-says/ar-BB1qiaLk

Another explanation of what happened with Cloudstrike.

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/g-s1-12222/microsoft-outage-banks-airlines-broadcasters?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

A technological meltdown left employees of airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency services around the world staring at the dreaded “blue screen of death” on Friday as their computers went inert in what is being described as a historic outage.

I thought this was interesting that Mac and Linux users were not affected, particularly, Linux.

Customers using Mac and Linux operating systems were not affected, CrowdStrike said.

First of all can I say I couldn't believe the news when I saw this! As the news during the day unfolded it became obvious to me how reliant and vulnerable we are on these systems!

Flights, Doctors, Pharmacies, Cash Points, Banks even TV stations!

When they reported it was down to one company "Crowdstrike" I was amazed at how many companies rely on this software, surely they would have had back-up software, they must have known this could happen one day?

It is really worrying, and this was a mistake by "Crowdstrike", just think about the consequences of a cyber attack, it appears to me that if they manage to target the right software, well, I hate to think!

I'm right there with you.  I was so shocked and looking at the world wide outage reveals how too interconnected we are.  Crowdstrike encompasses an international presence world wide, which has proven to be a failure with this outage because, as you've mentioned this has made too many companies vulnerable world wide with a downed system all at one time.

I looked up Crowdstrike.  It's in Austin, Texas.  After doing a little bit of reading, it also seems that they failed to really check the update before it was implemented live.  Agreed, I wondered too, how strong the IT departments were in these failures, but look, if the airports were affected, which you would think they would have rock solid IT always at the ready, they failed too.  Hospitals, Emergency rooms, banks (I checked my bank to see if it was down), 911 centers and I didn't realize pharmacies and TV Stations that you mentioned were down too.

I think this outage likely inspired future would be hacker's, so I get your concern.  Hackers now can really see the weaknesses and how far reaching they can disrupt companies with one click.  Right, really scary and unimaginable to think what a world wide cyber attack would look like and the damage in real lives that could also be caught in a failure like this if there was a disruption of this magnitude.

I agree with you there about inspiring hackers!

However, let's take a flashback in time when computers didn't have the operating systems like they do today, where you loaded your program from a cassette tape or floppy disk. That computer was then dedicated to that one program whatever its job was, maybe it's time for the big companies, banks, hospitals, airports etc. to develop their own bespoke IT systems without the need for 3rd party software?

I don't know, I'm not an IT engineer and only play around with programming but could that be the answer?

Just found this interesting article:

Scammers will pounce on global outage caused by CrowdStrike bug, Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil warns

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-20/crowdstrike-ceo-apologises/104121234

Horrifying what is happening by scammers already after reading your article.

"We are seeing cybercriminals register domains and register new websites that we believe they will use for the purpose of phishing campaigns and other online scams and fraud."

Many of these websites contained keywords like CrowdStrike, fix, and BDOS (a tech acronym for basic disk operating system).

Why are domain companies allowing these domain purchases?  Surely, they must know that these newly registered domains aren't being created for anything good.

I enjoyed your flashback memory...that was a nice thought to have recalling the floppy disk experience and your computer was your own and no creepy people had access through your OS.  I do like your idea about major companies developing their own IT.  I think it would be a good step for our cyber future to decouple from 3rd party software especially for the essential government and big businesses.  It's expensive though but it makes sense.