A global tech outage disrupted major airlines, media companies, banks, and telecommunications firms worldwide Friday morning.
Australia’s government said the outage appeared to be linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. firm said in a promotional video this year.
According to an alert sent by Crowdstrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death.”
The alert, sent at 1:30 a.m. ET on Friday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue. A Crowdstrike spokesperson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.
In a post on X, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” Kurtz also clarified that the incident is “not a security incident or cyberattack.”
In the post, Kurtz says the issue has been identified, a fix has been deployed, and that the company will “continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.” Additionally, Kurtz said the company is “fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of Crowdstrike customers.”
According to its website, Crowdstrike launched in 2012 and currently has the “world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is Crowdstrike? The company linked to the global Microsoft outage
