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In this photo illustration, the Crowdstrike logo is displayed on a smartphone.
CNN
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A global computer outage that affected airports, banks and other businesses on Friday appears to be at least partly caused by a software update issued by CrowdStrike, a major US cybersecurity firm, experts told CNN.
CrowdStrike told customers early Friday that the outage was caused by “a flaw found in a single content update for software on Microsoft Windows operating systems,” CEO George Kurtz said in a post on X.
Kurtz later posted on X that the company apologized to customers on Friday and said it “deeply regrets any inconvenience and trouble caused.”
He reiterated that the outage was not the result of a security breach or cyberattack and maintained that CrowdStrike customers are “fully protected.”
“We are working with all affected customers to ensure that their systems are restored and that they can receive the service they expect,” Kurtz said, reiterating that the cause of the outage was not malicious.
According to the advisory seen by CNN, the company's engineers have taken steps to address the issue and have instructed customers to restart their computers and take other measures if technical issues persist. The advisory said the issue is specific to CrowdStrike's flagship software product, Falcon, and does not affect Mac or Linux operating systems. CrowdStrike said Falcon is designed to protect files stored in the cloud.
CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software is used by many Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies, to detect and block hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep access to a computer's operating system to scan for threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to crash due to a flaw in the way software code updates issued by CrowdStrike interact with Windows systems.
The company said the outage was not the result of a security incident or cyberattack. Kurtz said in his post that the issue had been identified and isolated, and that engineers had deployed an update to fix the problem.
CrowdStrike (CRWD) shares were down 9% in mid-afternoon trading.
The cybersecurity giant operates worldwide by selling software and investigating large-scale hacks.
The company also cooperates with the U.S. government on cybersecurity investigations. For example, CrowdStrike has tracked North Korean hackers for more than a decade, according to the company, and was tasked with tracking the group that hacked Sony Pictures in 2014.
However, CrowdStrike is best known for its investigation into the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's computers during the 2016 US election. The company has been at the center of false conspiracy theories since 2016, most notably after White House recordings revealed that former President Donald Trump mentioned CrowdStrike in a July 2016 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, leading to his first impeachment.
Crowdstrike was the first company to publicly raise the alarm about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Crowdstrike's assessment was later confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies.
This story has been updated with additional context
