What caused Microsoft to Crash | Crowdstrike attack | Microsoft Issue Real Reason

Today world has seen one of the worst cyber outage ever. It was one of the biggest cyber outages to have ever taken place. Systems went down across the world. It started last evening at about 7 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. That's when the chaos began. In airports, banks, hospitals, news studios, and even in Disneyland Paris, people in all these places saw something ominous. All of the computer monitors were off. They simply shut down.

• Airports around the world faced issues. They could not update flight details, check in passengers, or even print boarding passes. Some of them, like Delhi Airport, opted for a manual approach. They started issuing handwritten boarding passes. Others canceled flights. There were over a thousand cancellations in the U.S. American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines all halted flights. The Dutch airline KLM suspended most of its operations. Berlin Airport halted all flights. Air traffic in Switzerland was cut by 30%. Every corner of the world was affected.

• Supermarkets in Australia were shut because their checkout counters weren't working. In Paris, the organizers of the Olympics were facing issues. They had to conduct manual security checks because their accreditation desk was down.

How Did it happen

The outage was caused by this company, CrowdStrike. Ironically, it's a cyber security firm, a company that makes antivirus softwares and investigates cyber attacks. This is the company that messed up. Now, you may wonder, how did it cause such widespread damage? After all, many of you may never have even heard of its name. So how did it access so many computers all over the world? Well, CrowdStrike works with other companies and one of its clients is Microsoft. CrowdStrike put out a security update yesterday at about 7 p.m. GMT. This update was rolled out across Microsoft computers and that is how the cyber incident began. There was a problem with the update. It did not react well with Microsoft systems. It caused them to crash and display the dreaded blue screen of death. That's it.

That is the reason for the global outage. An automated security update took down Microsoft and in turn, Microsoft took down companies all over the world because this is Microsoft, the most widely used operating system in the world. If Microsoft goes down, the world grinds to a halt and that's what happened today. The issue has been resolved now as CrowdStrike was more than eager to announce. This is a message from their CEO. He said that the issue had been identified and isolated and a fix had been deployed. But his message also raised a few other concerns. He insisted that the outage was not caused by a security incident or a cyber attack. He was very clear about that. That means that all the damage done today was by mistake. But what happens if someone tries to do it on purpose? Think about it.

Today proved that the entire world is indeed connected and completely dependent on certain companies and their products. If any of these are compromised, the world will face a major setback. Millions of people will be inconvenienced. Businesses will lose billions and will be sent back to the Stone Age. It's a scary thought. So what can we do? We cannot disconnect. That would also set the world back. But we can diversify. Look at the CrowdStrike CEO's message again. He said that today's issue only affected Windows and that Mac and Linux were not impacted. So if we maintain backups, if we can turn to alternative systems during times of trouble, we would be more secure against both mistakes and attacks. It is not a cost-effective solution, but it may be the only one that we have right now. Because if we do not diversify, if we put all our eggs in just one basket, days like today will become more and more common.