Software company behind worldwide outages is Texas based
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A computer error from to the global outage caused by CrowdStrike. Photo: Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images
A worldwide, cross-industry internet outage early Friday was caused by an error at Austin-based CrowdStrike, a company meant to prevent such crises.
Why it matters: The global meltdown that grounded flights and halted banking is a black eye for cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike, which has been trusted by U.S. federal security agencies and some of the biggest companies in the world.
- In San Antonio, there were as many as 60 delays and 13 canceled flights, according to Flightaware.com data obtained by KSAT.
- The Bexar County Tax Assessor-Collector's Office stopped all motor vehicle transactions due to the outage.
- Emergency calls were not affected, according to the San Antonio Police Department.
State of play: CrowdStrike software is used by sectors including airline, banking, media and entertainment, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, state government and technology.
Catch up quick: The outage was not linked to a security incident or cyberattack, CrowdStrike said. It was caused by a defect in an overnight product update.
- A fix for the issue was deployed, the company said on Friday morning.
Zoom in: CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company that provides cloud security tools, endpoint security, incident response and threat intelligence products.
- Last year, it added a generative AI assistant for customers, Charlotte AI.
What they're saying: "CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data – to keep customers ahead of today's adversaries and stop breaches," its website said.
- The outage affected devices hosted by Microsoft's Windows operating system.
- CrowdStrike's Falcon sensor, linked with the crash, was "built to stop breaches via a unified set of cloud-delivered technologies."
By the numbers: CrowdStrike made up almost 15% of the market share for security software segments in 2023, per July analysis from management consulting company Gartner.
- It was second to Microsoft, which was 40%.
Between the lines: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency selected CrowdStrike in 2021 as one of the major platforms to support some of its security initiatives.
- The company was one of the first industry partners to work with a Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, launched to improve risk management across federal, state and local levels.