Global IT Outage Due to Windows Update to Last Several Days: CEO 'Deeply Apologises' for Worldwide Chaos

George Kurtz, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, said the company is ‘deeply sorry for the impact we have caused customers’ after a buggy software update caused a global IT outage.

Kurtz said the problem came down to a bug in a single update. 

‘We identified it very quickly and fixed the problem,’ he said.

Antivirus company Crowdstrike quickly became a household name today when it confirmed that a bug in its software was the cause of IT problems on Microsoft devices worldwide. 

Airports, banks and stock exchanges in many countries have been affected.

CrowdStrike is now ‘working with every customer to make sure we can get them back online,’ Kurtz added.

He also said that there was a ‘negative interaction’ between the update and Microsoft's operating system, which then caused computers to crash, causing a global outage that is still ongoing.

Asked how one erroneous update could cause such global chaos, he said: ‘We have to go back and look at what happened here.’

He made it clear that there was no possibility that it was a cyberattack. However, even though the problem has been identified, and a patch issued, Kurtz said that ‘it may take some time for some systems’ to return to normal, stressing that they will not ‘just automatically recover’.