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A global tech outage has disrupted operations at major airlines, banks and firms around the world, USA TODAY reports.
Australia’s government said the outage appeared to be linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, the USA TODAY article continued. The firm is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, according to a promotional video it posted this year.
In a post on X, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was not a “security incident or cyberattack.”
He said it was connected to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” He said the issue has been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
So what is CrowdStrike? And how is it involved? Here’s what we know.
What is CrowdStrike? What does it do?
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that protects cloud-based systems, including workloads, data and identity, according to its website. It also protects against online attacks and monitors threats.
It does business around the world and investigates major hacks, CNN reports. It also runs cybersecurity investigations for the US government, including tracking North Korean hackers.
Who owns CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike was founded in 2012 by CEO George Kurtz, formerly of McAfee. It’s a publicly traded company owned by investors.
What big companies use CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike is used by some of the biggest companies in cloud services, including Amazon AWS, according to Forbes. Its products are used by thousands of companies across the world.
Who is CrowdStrike’s biggest competitor?
The firm’s biggest competitor is SentinelOne Singularity Platform, according to Gartner Peer Insights, which allows users to rate products. SentinelOne earned 4.7 stars out of five on 1,219 ratings. McAfee and Duo Security are others.
Global Microsoft outage grounds flights
More than 500 flights were delayed or canceled due to communications disruptions, USA TODAY reports.
Several U.S. carriers, including American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines, issued ground stops for all their flights early on Friday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. They were among the many who grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved a cloud-services-related outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.
However, it was not immediately clear whether the delays were related to the Microsoft cloud outage. The Washington state-based tech giant did not immediately return an emailed request for comment by USA TODAY.