The global computer outage affecting airports, banks and other businesses on Friday appears to stem at least partly from a software update issued by major US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN.
Kurtz later apologized to customers Friday, and said the company is “deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” he posted on X. “We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” Kurtz said, reiterating that the cause of the outage was not malicious.
CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software — used by numerous Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies — detects and blocks hacking threats. Like other cybersecurity products, the software requires deep-level access to a computer’s operating system to scan for those threats. In this case, computers running Microsoft Windows appear to be crashing because of the faulty way a software code update issued by CrowdStrike is interacting with the Windows system.