Much Worse Than The Y2K Bug: CrowdStrike Update Causes Global Chaos

A global IT crisis caused by an update to CrowdStrike cybersecurity software has led to widespread crashes and significant disruptions across critical sectors, surpassing the severity of the Y2K bug.

Much Worse Than The Y2K Bug:  CrowdStrike Update Causes Global Chaos
Photo by Joshua Hoehne / Unsplash

The entire planet woke up this morning to a widespread IT problem primarily affecting Windows workstations equipped with the cybersecurity software "CrowdStrike." Read all the news here. The issue manifests as computers crashing with a "blue screen of death." The fix is relatively simple but not within everyone's reach and is currently a manual process at the time of this writing.

The prevalence of this software means that several critical sectors of the economy are affected. This is by far the most significant IT outage in recent years and is more severe than the anticipated issues during the Y2K transition. One might have thought it was a massive cyber attack, but it is not; it appears to be a problem introduced following an update to the CrowdStrike software.

Having worked in IT for over thirty years, I am stunned by the scale of the outage and believe that CrowdStrike will have to answer to their clients. The impact on industries such as banks and air transport is massive. I think we will be hearing about this for a long time.

I hope you werenโ€™t personally impacted by this. Iโ€™m not.