So Much For Cloud Resilience! A CrowdStrike Bug Hits Windows
On Friday 19 July 2024, Microsoft reported that it suffered a major outage for many Azure services. This affected airlines, banks and media:
and [here]:
Along with this, all the GP practices using the EMIS infrastructure in the NHS in England were bought down. Many other sites were down:
One thing that has been pinpointed is the crashing of the CloudStrike Falcon system on many desktops (and thus on servers in the Cloud):
CrowdStrike have already published a patch for Falcon Sensor, and which affects all of CrowdStike’s customers:
It seems to relate to a faulty channel file provided by CrowdStike, and which can be patched with:
- Restart Windows and boot into Troubleshooting mode
2. Open a command prompt
3. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike
4. Locate the file matching “C-00000291* sys”, and delete it.
5. Continue normal startup
Overall, it looks like the Falcon Sensor bug caused Azure services to glitch, and which caused many systems around the world to fall-over.
In pre-market trading, CloudStrike’s shares dropped over 10%:
The advice for Enterprise clients is to restore Cloud PCs to a state before the update (on 19 July 2024) [here]:
One, thing to remember, is to build resilience into your IT systems, so that a failure of any part of your infrastructure will not bring down the whole infrastructure. You can learn more about the Cloud here:
