The Crowdstrike Falcon outage
A faulty update was distributed to a cybersecurity software called The Falcon Sensor, provided by the company Crowdstrike. The botched update to the configuration files of the kernel-level vulnerability scanner caused an out-of-bounds memory read operation that resulted in affected machines booting over and over again. The fault was found and a fix was distributed within 12 hours, but damage had already been caused. Manually fixing the affected machines would take a lot longer. A total of over 8.5 million Windows systems had crashed, causing a multitude of different businesses to have their services to be hindered or even completely halted, including airlines, banks, different government agencies, railway traffic, and media companies.