CrowdStrike fallout | Why did your home Windows PC survive the Microsoft outage?

The CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage that disrupted flight operations globally, flashing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on several enterprise Windows PCs last week, did not affect Windows computers used at home. Why didn’t the outage disrupt home PCs? That’s because CrowdStrike’s Falcon solution was deployed only at companies that buy the cybersecurity firm’s licenses in a sizeable chunk.

Backed by Warburg Pincus and launched in stealth-mode back in 2012, the Austin, Texas-headquartered company CrowdStrike was established to sell security solutions that would protect intellectual property and ward off data theft. Unlike Microsoft, which sells its operating system to both individuals and corporations, CrowdStrike sells its Falcon platform only to businesses. Though it does sell a security platform called Falcon Prevent that can be used by work-from-home employees, it is not entirely a personal PC security solution.

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And from what we know about the crash so far, a CrowdStrike update on Windows systems caused the outage. Not just that–we also know that the incident did not cause any damage to Google or AWS cloud ecosystems. While Microsoft can’t be entirely blamed for this crash that affected enterprise Windows systems globally, the age-old question of whether open-source Linux ecosystems are better than close-looped Windows systems has once again come back to haunt the software giant.

As CrowdStrike is working hard to fix the issue, and as affected enterprise systems are gradually recovering, the cybersecurity company will need to take stock of the situation and ensure that such incidents don’t happen in future.

Microsoft, for its part, has released a Windows repair tool to remove the CrowdStrike driver from affected systems.

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