- READ MORE: Microsoft crisis unleashes chaos – Live blog
Crowdstrike has issued an apology after causing global chaos on Friday after deploying a faulty update to its software that caused an outage at Microsoft.
The cybersecurity firm’s chief executive, George Kurtz, spoke publicly about six hours after the systems went down, saying the “blue screen of death” was caused by a software bug.
“We deeply regret the impact we’ve had on our customers, on travelers, on anyone who’s been affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz said in an interview with NBC’s “Today.”
It also pledged to work with each customer individually as they try to get their operations back online, which could take hours.
The cybersecurity firm’s chief executive, George Kurtz, spoke publicly about six hours after the systems went down, saying the “blue screen of death” was caused by a software bug.
“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it is now working,” Kurtz said.
“It may take some time for some systems to recover automatically,” he added, but the company “will ensure that every customer is fully recovered.”
Americans woke up to the news of the “mother of all outages” and found that computers running Windows were stuck on a blue screen with the error message “DRIVER_OVERRAN_STACK_BUFFER.”
However, the Crowdstrike bug also affected banks, airlines, television networks, trains and health systems.
Images and footage from airports across the country showed weary travellers staring at blank screens, wondering if their flight would take off.
And many hospitals have cancelled all Friday appointments because their networks have collapsed.
“When you look at software, it’s a very complex world with a lot of interactions, and staying ahead of your adversary is a difficult task,” Kurtz told Today.
‘So these kinds of things, obviously, you know you try to understand them and mitigate them and in some cases you have a strange interaction and it doesn’t seem to happen on all Windows systems, there are different versions, flavors and patch levels.
Images and footage from airports across the country showed weary travelers staring at blank screens, wondering if their flight would take off. Pictured: People waiting at New York’s JFK airport
“We’re just trying to resolve where that negative interaction occurred and, again, that’s what we’re focused on to get customers back up and running.”
Kurtz was asked how a single software bug could have such a significant and immediate impact.
The CEO began to stutter, appearing nervous after the question, saying that the update was pushed and now the team needs to “go back and see what happened.”
Kurtz posted on X around 5:30 a.m. ET that Crowdstrike had issued a fix for the default issue, but did not provide a time when the US would be back online and operational.
“As you can imagine, we’ve been talking to our customers all night,” he said. “A lot of them are rebooting the system and it’s working because we’ve fixed it on our end.”
“It could take some time,” he added. “Sometimes some systems don’t recover automatically… we’re not going to let up until all customers are back to where they were.”
The flaw was uploaded to Crowdstrike’s ‘Falcon Sensor’ software, which scans connections to and from the internet to determine if malicious behavior is occurring.
However, Kurtz’s apology on Today came after the CEO shared a post on X detailing that the company had implemented a fix.
The messages caused a stir among the public who cited lack of instructions from the CEO and “poor communication” about “the mother of all disruptions.”