The CrowdStrike outage
A faulty security update grounds airlines and stops hospitals in the largest IT failure ever recorded.
- When
- Known to
- ± 12 hours
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
A defective channel file pushed by CrowdStrike on 19 July 2024 sent 8.5 million Windows machines into boot loops. Airlines, banks, broadcasters, supermarkets and emergency lines went down worldwide, and because the fix required physical access to each machine, recovery took days. Insured losses ran into billions. No attacker was involved, which was the point: a single vendor's update had the reach of a global cyberattack.