What is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike is enterprise level cybersecurity software that helps detect and protect company computers from hacks and other cybersecurity breaches. It is used by multiple Fortune 500 companies operating in the financial, transportation, healthcare and energy sectors. Typically, big brands and enterprise companies remotely deploy software updates to their computers and thereby avoid manual installs times thousands. Ideally, these updates run seamlessly behind the scenes.
What happened on Friday?
In this instance, CrowdStrike pushed an update that caused Windows computers to encounter the much-dreaded Blue Screen of Death or, BSOD. This error will completely lock up the affected computer.
The problematic update from CrowdStrike also caused an issue when restarting machines. You might be hearing about computers “stuck in a boot loop”. A boot loop is when the computer restarts and crashes immediately after restarting, this prevents any of the software from loading and prevents affected computers from being resolved remotely.
Is my website safe?
Yes, your website is safe. WebSight Design uses Linux servers for all our clients' web hosting. Linux software was not affected by this outage.
Is my personal computer safe?
To be clear, only Windows computers have been affected. If you are on an Apple computer or device you will not be affected. Secondly, if you are not using the CrowdStrike software on your computer you will not be affected by this outage. CrowdStrike is enterprise level cybersecurity software and is not normally sold to individual retail customers, so the chances of your personal computer being affected are very low.
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