If you’ve never heard of CrowdStrike, that’s probably a good thing. That all changed Friday afternoon when reports started coming out of Australia. Their largest airport was showing the infamous blue recovery screen by Microsoft on many of their computer terminals and jumbo monitors.
Thousands of miles away, the U.S. was still sound asleep as CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company with a market cap around $90 billion was pushing a code update to enterprise systems around the world running Windows.
A defect in a single content update, per their blog post, caused enough havoc to not only shut down flights in New Zealand, Perth, and Canberra but made its way to Japan, took out broadcast networks in the UK like Sky News and CBBC channels, knocked out a few financial services and banks along with a few more airlines in London, Germany, and the United States.
Even students at the university near me could not use the computer labs all day as 90% were running Windows.
What was first feared a cyberattack was simply a bug in the code that caused computers to loop and fail, many which would ultimately require a manual reboot to each computer individually. Remember the…