On July 19, a global cyber blackout affected various sectors, including banks, major supermarket chains, and airports, leading to disruptions in services and flight cancellations.

A security firm named Crowdstrike was developing an update for servers running on Windows.

Crowdstrike provides cybersecurity services to major corporations. The founder, George Kurtz, attributed the issue to an update associated with its primary service, Falcon. Falcon is a cloud-based platform that integrates antivirus, threat detection, and threat intelligence.

The CEO said he is aware of the issue and has been informed by X that necessary actions have been implemented, and a new update is being distributed to resolve the problem.

CrowdStrike is currently assisting customers affected by a flaw in a content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected. It is not a security incident or cyberattack. The problem has been identified, isolated, and a solution has been implemented.

What occurred?

Crowdstrike automatically distributed an update to numerous servers, resulting in blue screens and system boot failures due to a faulty device driver at the Windows kernel level.

Remote reversal is ineffective, so operators must manually access data centers to remove the problematic driver and restart each server separately.

The consequences were significant: Airports like Philadelphia experienced disruptions, with delayed or numerous canceled flights, and banks, such as Bradesco in Brazil, faced service outages.

Domestic users’ computers should remain unaffected by this power outage.