A misconfigured content update released by CrowdStrike late on Thursday inadvertently triggered worldwide outages across Microsoft Windows systems, taking many of the world’s most essential services offline.
CrowdStrike was attempting to update content that their Falcon Sensor uses to perform real-time threat detection and endpoint protection by monitoring system activities that identify suspicious behavior to prevent cyber attacks. The content update contains logic designed to fine-tune the detection of malicious activities and is based on the latest threat intelligence CrowdStrike collects on a real-time, continuous basis.