Security News > 2024 > July > Faulty CrowdStrike Update Crashes Windows Systems, Impacting Businesses Worldwide

Businesses across the world have been hit by widespread disruptions to their Windows workstations stemming from a faulty update pushed out by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," the company's CEO George Kurtz said in a statement.

It's worth noting that the outage has also impacted Google Cloud Compute Engine, causing Windows virtual machines using CrowdStrike's csagent.

"After having automatically received a defective patch from CrowdStrike, Windows VMs crash and will not be able to reboot," it said.

Amazon Web Services, for its part, said it has taken steps to mitigate the issue for as many Windows instances, Windows Workspaces, and Appstream Applications as possible, recommending customers still affected by the issue to "Take action to restore connectivity."

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont said "I have obtained the CrowdStrike driver they pushed via auto update. I don't know how it happened, but the file isn't a validly formatted driver and causes Windows to crash every time."

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2024/07/faulty-crowdstrike-update-crashes.html