{"id":95149,"date":"2025-02-18T07:41:05","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/anthropology\/major-internet-outages-are-getting-bigger-and-occurring-more-often-a-reflection-on-the-crowdstrike-it-outage\/"},"modified":"2025-02-18T07:41:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:41:05","slug":"major-internet-outages-are-getting-bigger-and-occurring-more-often-a-reflection-on-the-crowdstrike-it-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=95149","title":{"rendered":"Major Internet Outages are Getting Bigger and Occurring More Often: A Reflection on the CrowdStrike IT Outage"},"content":{"rendered":"


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At 09:30 a.m. BST on 19 July 2024, IT systems around the world suddenly ground to a halt. Without their computer systems, pharmacies, doctors\u2019 surgeries, airports, train providers, and banks, among other critical services, were unable to operate. Websites and entertainment platforms went offline. Supermarket deliveries were cancelled. Retailers\u2019 payment systems were unable to process transactions. Emergency services were disrupted. TV Channels were unable to air.<\/p>\n

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Figs. 1-2: Several websites were unable to function due to the outage. Image by author.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The outage highlighted the fragile foundation of global internet infrastructure. The scale and significance of the outage was captured by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who took to social media platform X with a simple post that said: \u201cbiggest IT fail ever.\u201d Others in the IT industry similarly described the event as \u201cone of the largest mass outages in IT history\u201d (Moss 2024a).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 3: Elon Musk posting about the global IT outage on 19 July 2024. Source: x.com\/elonmusk<\/a> (Public Domain)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Technical Issue<\/h2>\n

While it is difficult to quantify the impact of IT outages, this event caused long-lasting and far-reaching disruption across business, industry, and society. Organizations relying on Windows systems were unable to reboot their computers after a security update was rolled out by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike<\/a>. According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz<\/a>, a \u201cdefect\u201d in one of its software updates for Windows operating systems was identified as the cause of the outage.<\/p>\n

The technology at fault was the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor<\/a>, a cloud-delivered tool used to protect against security breaches, such as malware attacks and hacking threats. The update caused Windows systems to crash, resulting in \u201cblue screen of death\u201d error messages (BBC 2024) and causing systems to enter a \u2018bootloop<\/a>\u2019 (whereby a computer system continually reboots itself). CrowdStrike software is deeply embedded into the Windows operating system. Microsoft estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices were impacted by the outage (Moss 2024a) but were keen to place the focus on CrowdStrike, highlighting in a statement that \u201cthis was not a Microsoft incident\u201d (Weston 2024). However, the lack of Windows\u2019 ability to deal with the issue in a capable manner other than simply crashing the system also highlighted major deficiencies within the Windows operating system.<\/p>\n

To resolve the issue, affected organizations had to boot their computers in safe mode, remove the faulty update, and then download the safe patched update. In some cases 15 reboots were reportedly needed (Plummer and Gerken 2024). This is a time-consuming process, and, on top of this, the impacted businesses and organisations had to deal with the significant backlog arising from all of the suspended services. Recovery time estimates ranged from days to months, but 99% of affected Windows systems were back online by the end of July (Kerner 2024). The Global Payroll Association said that many workers would experience a delay in their monthly pay following the IT outage (2024).<\/p>\n

The outage also had a major financial and reputational impact on CrowdStrike. After the event, their shares opened nearly 15% down on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York (Saul 2024), equating to a roughly $12.5 billion decrease in company value. It is expected that the software firm will have to pay out billions in insurance claims (Moss 2024b). In the meantime, CrowdStrike reportedly sent some partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology (Moss 2024c).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 4: Blue screen of death error message. Source: Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Who Are CrowdStrike?<\/span><\/p>\n

Until the outage, many of us had never heard of CrowdStrike. Founded in 2011, and based in Austin, Texas, CrowdStrike provides a range of endpoint cybersecurity software solutions to large organisations. Valued at over $80 billion (Field 2024), they first listed their shares publicly on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2019 and \u00a0quickly came to dominate the endpoint security market<\/a> (their 2023 Q4 earnings report<\/a> highlights that they have nearly 24,000 customers).<\/p>\n

CrowdStrike is not a household name. Unlike other IT security software providers like McAfee, AVG, or Norton, which many people are familiar with because these corporations provide anti-virus software for end-user consumers, CrowdStrike primarily targets enterprise customers. They are an example of a small number of obscure, but hugely powerful, IT corporations unknown to the general public, who are nevertheless responsible for an oversized portion of the globe\u2019s computing infrastructure. While Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are household names, some of the less well-known corporations that now form the operational backbone of the internet include Cloudflare, Akamai, Oracle, and Fastly.<\/p>\n

The Danger of Consolidating Computing Infrastructure<\/h2>\n

The CrowdStrike outage provided us with an eye-opening reminder of the vulnerabilities that arise from the centralization of computing infrastructure. When one corporation dominates its market to the extent that CrowdStrike does with endpoint security, the result is a single point of failure. The outage did not only highlight the risks of IT concentration, but also the risk of organizational over-dependence on a single operating system provider, with many organizations relying solely on Windows for their IT provision.<\/p>\n

The network model of computing infrastructure was originally conceived during the Cold War. Network computing was seen to offer a highly resilient, nuclear attack-proof design made up of multiple nodes and connections. The idea was that networks would avoid any single point of failure: if one connection should fail, data traffic would continue via the connections that remained. However, as media historians of IT infrastructure have highlighted, this idea was always more of a fantasy than a reality (Hu 2016). Far from a massively distributed and decentralised network, the logics of monopoly capitalism led to a handful of powerful corporations controlling large parts of the internet. The rise of cloud computing has further facilitated centralisation, enabling computing resources to be delivered over the internet by a few large companies (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Digital Reality, Equinix, Oracle). The intensifying consolidation of global computing infrastructure is now leading to a growing number of large-scale IT outages, making the precarious reality of the internet increasingly more apparent. Indeed, the July 2024 event is merely the latest (and potentially the largest yet) outages that has occurred in recent years:<\/p>\n