CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, released a software update late on Thursday, July 18, which caused the outage that continued to disrupt systems, affecting everything from stock exchanges to airports, early on Friday morning.
Speaking on Live TV, CrowStrike CEO, George Kurtz said “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this.”
He continued, “The company located and isolated the problem, implemented a fix, and directed customers to its support portal for additional updates.”
At 9:22 AM, the company updated that remedy and acknowledged that the problem still hadn’t been resolved as networks and business systems were having trouble going online.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said on social media.
One expert suggested it may be the “largest IT outage in history.”
Kurtz has since said that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” stressing that Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.
Daniel Ives, managing director and senior equities research analyst at Wedbush Securities, stated that the impact of the outage was unprecedented in a letter to clients on Friday.
He claimed that “businesses, airports, consumers, and a ripple impact never seen globally” are being impacted by the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage.
The CEO, in an official statement on the company’s blog late on Friday, said:
“Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike.
“As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”
We earlier reported that a former researcher at Apple and an ex-NSA hacker are creating a firm called “DoubleYou,” which intends to assist other cybersecurity product manufacturers in improving the security of Apple devices.
