The “Blue Screen of Death.” Many of you may be familiar with this phrase, but if you are not, it is NOT a good thing. Early Thursday morning, a large cybersecurity company, CloudStrike, encountered a security update defect. The update was rolled out to Windows OS devices and does not seem to be affecting other platforms.
In a recent statement made on X (formerly named Twitter), CEO of CloudStrike stated, “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified and isolated, and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they are communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels” and assure customers, “Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.” There are many organizations that were greatly affected by this incident. One being, Frontier Airlines.
For companies like Frontier and Allegiant Airlines, this outage halted their work. Flights were delayed and even cancelled due to this update defect. Frontier cancelled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 others (Resources found on FlightAware). Microsoft was another major organization that was affected by this “Blue Screen of Death”. They stated that this outage began at around 6am ET on Thursday, July 18th. It specifically affected the Microsoft product, Azure, a cloud computing platform.
As for the aftermath, CloudStrike has already sent and deployed an update to counteract the defect, but many companies are going to need some time getting back on their feet. Microsoft, Amazon and Frontier Airlines are only some of the major organizations that were affected. With millions of travelers stranded in airports and Microsoft’s reputation already in mucky waters from their recent security breach incident, let us just say that this outage will not be quickly swept under the rug.