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CrowdStrike CEO gives assurances after outage
24 Jul 2024
According to CrowdStrike's preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR), last Friday’s major outage stemmed from a Rapid Response Content update that caused a memory error, leading to the Windows crashes. The defective Falcon content update that caused Windows systems running sensor version 7.11 and above to crash didn’t affect Mac and Linux systems. CrowdStrike claims that the problem was quickly identified and fixed within an hour and 18 minutes.
The global Microsoft outage was caused by a CrowdStrike update glitch. Source: NASA/Unsplash
CrowdStrike's CEO, George Kurtz, issued an apology and assurance to customers and partners.
"I want to sincerely apologise directly to all of you for the outage," said Kurtz in a statement.
"All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority."
The defect was traced back to a bug in the Content Validator, which allowed problematic content data to pass validation and be deployed into production.
This caused an unexpected exception that the system could not gracefully handle, leading to the crashes.
No cyberattack
Kurtz was quick to assure the public that the outage was not a cyberattack and that there was no impact on the protection capabilities of the Falcon platform systems.
"CrowdStrike is operating normally, and this issue does not affect our Falcon platform systems. There is no impact to any protection if the Falcon sensor is installed. Falcon Complete and Falcon OverWatch services are not disrupted," he stated.
In response to the incident, CrowdStrike is implementing several measures to prevent future occurrences.
These include enhancing Rapid Response Content testing, including local developer testing, stress testing, and stability testing.
They’ll also be adding additional validation checks to the Content Validator and implementing a staggered deployment strategy for Rapid Response Content updates.
Better customer controls
CrowdStrike will also be providing customers with greater control over content updates and offering detailed release notes.
Kurtz assured that the company is committed to full transparency and will release a comprehensive Root Cause Analysis once the investigation is complete.
"Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike.”
“As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again," he concluded.
