George Kurtz, the president and CEO of Crowdstrike, says the issue that caused a major global tech outage has been fixed. However, problems may persist for some time.
"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," CrowdStrike's CEO said early Friday of the massive global tech outage. "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack."
The CEO continued, "We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates. And will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they're communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers."
However, Kurtz said that systems may not just automatically recover from the issue. "It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won't recover," Kurtz told NBC's TODAY show this morning. He said the company was "deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this."
Global Tech Outage Causes Major Issues
However, he said that many should be able to use their devices after the fix. "Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it's coming up, and it'll be operational because we fixed it on our end," he said. "We're just trying to sort out where the negative interaction was."
But for some, it may take days to fix. The Blue Screen of Death cannot be fixed remotely. It must be fixed manually. "It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed — the Blue Screen of Death — they cannot be updated remotely and this the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days," he said.
So far it's had a profound impact on things. Several major airlines were grounded. Satnam Narang, senior staff researcher at Tenable, said he's never seen anything like this before.
"It's very far reaching and we're still just in the beginnings of this right now," he said. "We've never seen anything like this before, it's very unprecedented."
