CrowdStrike says global technical outage was due to quality control error – National

A CrowdStrike CRWD.O software update that crashed computers worldwide last week across industries ranging from aviation to banking to healthcare was caused by a bug in the U.S. cybersecurity firm’s quality control mechanism, the company said on Wednesday.

Friday’s outage was caused by a flaw in CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, an advanced platform that protects systems from malicious software and hackers, that caused computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system MSFT.O to crash and display a “Blue Screen of Death” screen.

“A bug in the Content Validator caused one of the two Template Instances to pass validation despite containing problematic content data,” CrowdStrike said in a statementciting the failure of an internal quality control mechanism that allowed problematic data to slip through the company’s own security checks.

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CrowdStrike did not say what the content data was, nor why it was problematic. A “Template Instance” is a set of instructions that guides the software on how to look for threats and respond. CrowdStrike said it had added a “new check” to its quality assurance process in an effort to prevent the problem from happening again.

The extent of the damage from the botched update is still being assessed. On Saturday, Microsoft said that about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected, and the U.S. House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz requesting testimony.

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CrowdStrike last week published information on how to fix the affected systems. However, experts said it would take time to get the systems back online because the faulty code had to be manually removed.

Wednesday’s statement echoed a widely held assessment by cybersecurity experts that something had gone seriously wrong in CrowdStrike’s quality control process.

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Reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Kirsten Donovan