Crowdstrike blames a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to send bad data to millions of customer computers, leading to last week’s crash. global technical outage causing flights to be grounded, TV broadcasts to be halted and banks, hospitals and shops to be disrupted.
Crowdstrike also said it would take steps to prevent similar outages in the future, including phasing out updates, giving customers more control over when and where updates occur, and providing more details about planned updates.
The company posted details of its “preliminary post-incident report” online on Wednesday. judgement “of the outage, which caused chaos for the many companies that pay for the cybersecurity company’s software services.
The issue was related to an “undetected error” in the content configuration update for the Falcon platform, which affected Windows machines, the Texas company said.
A bug in the content validation system allowed “problematic content data” to be deployed to Crowdstrike customers, causing an “unexpected exception” that crashed the Windows operating system, the company said.
CrowdStrike said a “significant number” of the roughly 8.5 million computers that crashed on Friday and caused global disruptions are back up and running, as customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
Once the investigation is complete, Crowdstrike will release its full analysis of the meltdown.
The outage caused days of widespread technological chaosemphasized how much of the world depends on about some major computer service providers and the attention of supervisors who want more details about what went wrong.