Microsoft Outage: How CrowdStrike will fix millions of computers

Even though CrowdStrike issued a statement informing its customers about having deployed a fix to rectify the defect that has triggered global meltdown of Microsoft 365 apps and services, the situation could take some more hours to rectify.

"There will be millions of computers where this Falcon Sensor endpoint has been deployed. They (CrowdStrike) cannot ask them individually to do it (deploying the fix) themselves. They will issue a Over-The-Air (OTA) based update where the client can just activate the Internet and get the update. It may take some time as the system patch has to be released," Cybersecurity researcher Nanda Kishore said.

Detailing further, Kishore said: "One of the biggest doubts was that it could be a cyberattack or a vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers. These were initial speculations. But now, CyberStrike has verified that it is not a cyber attack, but an engineering issue from their side. So that has to be fixed, and that fix is something they are doing online. It is not an offline patch where the client needs to download it; manual intervention will be there, but even that is not clear from what he (Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz) posted on X."

Speaking about what happens once the situation has stabilized, he said that CrowdStrike could be "held accountable for the downtime of the product". "Downtime is a very important factor in cyber security, as it creates a business loss," he added.

Earlier today, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike confirmed that the widespread outage affecting companies across the globe, was not a result of a security incident or cyberattack. 

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz stated that the company was actively working with affected customers and had identified, isolated, and deployed a fix for the issue. 

Microsoft 365 reported on social media that they were working to reroute traffic to alternate systems to alleviate the impact, and later observed a positive trend in service availability. The issue, which was traced back to a defective content update for Windows hosts, caused disruptions to services including Visa, ADT security, Amazon, Airlines, and several banks and media broadcasters in Australia, the UK, Europe, India, and New Zealand.