The $5.4 Billion Computer Bug

On 07/19/2024, the world was shaken by what many are calling the worst cyber event in history. Roughly 8,500,000 computers were affected, over 9,000 flights were delayed, and massive shutdowns were felt across the world. Breaking news, a massive global technical outage has knocked critical computer infrastructure offline all across the country and in fact all around the world. Every one of them suffering at the hands of the same blue screen of death. Businesses, hospitals, airlines, government offices, all knocked offline because of a simple software update. Thousands of people suddenly stranded at airports, countless medical procedures canceled and delayed. The effects went far and beyond what anyone could have expected, instantly highlighting our heavy reliance on technology and how swiftly everything could crumble. To give you another visual, here is a time lapse showing the number of active flights nationwide overnight as the outage became more widespread. You can see the quick shrinkage as more airlines grounded planes and canceled flights. Who exactly is responsible for this? What happened? How did they respond? And ultimately, what can we learn from it? The story centers primarily around an Austin, Texas based cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike. But more specifically, the antivirus software known as CrowdStrike Falcon received an update to what's called a vulnerability scanner. The part of the program designed to assess devices and networks for weaknesses and, well, vulnerabilities. Essentially, they released an update containing an error. Since launch, the program has built up a client base of over 30,000 users, roughly 300 of which being Fortune 500 companies, as well as countless high profile and high risk customers like banks, airlines, and health care. However, to this point, CrowdStrike has played a trustworthy, silent, and powerful role in the fight for cybersecurity. They were hired to investigate such scandals as the twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen Democratic National Committee cyber attacks and even the 2014 Sony Pictures hack that saw a massive leak of personal information surrounding Sony employees. In April before the big crash that would lose companies millions of dollars, the company would begin seeing some crashes. And while they weren't nearly as severe as they would be later on, and they only affected Linux users, they were all caused by the same problem, routine software updates. However, just because a small number of users were affected by these aforementioned crashes in the long run, this should have absolutely been raising red flags within the company, especially in regards to their QA process. Whether due to mis oversight, or incompetence, CrowdStrike didn't seem to notice these foundational cracks. That is until they had no other choice. This is an NBC News special report. A massive global technical outage tied to CrowdStrike, which is a major cybersecurity provider, has knocked critical computer infrastructure offline all across the country and, in fact, all around the world. Video footage began emerging of countless passengers at LAX sleeping on the floor, exhausted from flight after flight being delayed …