What is CrowdStrike, the company behind the global Windows blackout, and what does it do?

What does CrowdStrike do?

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that provides services and products for protection against cyber threats. It was founded in 2011 and has since become known for its Falcon platform, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect, prevent and respond to threats in real time.

The company’s main services include analysis of cyber threat reports, cloud data protection, and promises to safeguard endpoints, or terminal devices such as computers and servers, which helps prevent attacks and malware.

What happened to Windows?

George Kurtz, CEO of the company, has already stated in various media and through his X account that the failure they had on July 19 was due to an automatic update that the systems did automatically, however this update was defective and therefore computers and servers only showed a blue screen.

CrowdStrike has a broad customer base spanning a variety of industries and sectors. Its core customers include banking, insurance companies, government agencies, and many technology companies including Microsoft and Dell, as well as companies in the energy and healthcare sectors.

The problem the company had was a bug in a CrowdStrike update that has caused crashes in thousands of Windows systems around the world, causing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). This problem has affected airlines, banks and other companies in countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Europe and the United States.

CrowdStrike has rolled back the changes responsible for the bug, but already affected systems need to manually delete a specific file to fix the issue and reboot normally.