Huge CrowdStrike outage, what does it all mean?
With all the news surrounding the CrowdStrike outage and crashing Microsoft Windows machines, many of our customers may be quite rightly concerned
Falcon graphic: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-falcon-content-update-for-windows-hosts/
With all the news surrounding the CrowdStrike outage and crashing Microsoft Windows machines, many of our customers may be quite rightly concerned. In this short post I’m going to do my best to explain what’s going on and what level of interruption you can expect.
Firstly, what is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike is a cyber security software company producing software to help protect Windows computers from malicious security attacks. CrowdStrike's Falcon software is heavily used by enterprise, global companies and public sector services. It’s common in transportation, healthcare, financial services, and education.
There’s a little confusion. CrowdStrike Falcon is not automatically installed on Windows computers, and, unless you’ve purchased and installed it, it won’t be on your personal computer. Given CrowdStrike's software is not sold directly to retail customers, this is unlikely. Your work machine may be a different story though.
So, what went wrong?
On Friday 19 July, CrowdStrike pushed out an automatic update to its kernel level drivers for Falcon. This update caused Windows to suffer the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and enter boot-loops.
If you encounter these issues, you should contact your IT department or provider right away, but expect them to be overwhelmed and very busy right now.
How are Honeystone services impacted?
We host all of our customer’s websites on Linux servers. All of our internal infrastructure is Linux based, and all of our employee machines run on Linux. Linux operating systems are not impacted by this outage and Honeystone has not experienced any operational challenges.
What about third-party services?
Our customers use a broad range of third-party services for their websites, email and other business information systems. The majority of these services are operated on Linux based infrastructure. The only issues we’ve encountered are with Microsoft hosted email services - Outlook, 365, and Exchange. If you use these services, it’s possible that some emails were dropped on Friday, but things seem to be operating normally now.
We’re available to assist
If you’re encountering any issues, feel free to contact us. Even if it’s outside of our control, we can advise on the appropriate actions and next steps.
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George Palmer
Senior developer at Honeystone and Co-Founder of TypedCMS.
Not a copywriter, or even a good writer, but I do like to write the occasional blog post.