A software bug in CrowdStrike’s quality control system caused the software update that crashed computers globally last week, the US firm said yesterday, as losses mount following the outage which disrupted services from aviation to banking.
The extent of the damage from the botched update is still being assessed. On Saturday, Microsoft said about 8.5 million Windows devices had been affected, and the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has sent a letter to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz asking him to testify.
The financial cost was also starting to come into focus yesterday. Insurer Parametrix said US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, will face $5.4 billion in losses as a result of the outage, and Malaysia’s digital minister called on CrowdStrike and Microsoft to consider compensating affected companies.
The outage happened because CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, an advanced platform that protects systems from malicious software and hackers, contained a fault that forced computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash and show the “Blue Screen of Death”.
“Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data,” CrowdStrike said in a statement, referring to the failure of an internal quality control mechanism that allowed the problematic data to slip through the company’s own safety checks.
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