A guide to understanding the cyber outage: was it Microsoft’s fault? What is CrowdStrike? And when will we return to normal?

It appeared as the dawn of each time zone and was quickly dubbed the blue screen of death. The name is far from metaphorical: a flaw in an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity platform caused a global disruption due to incompatibilities that were initially announced as exclusive to Windows 10 operating systems, but may have also affected version 11 of Microsoft’s operating system, generating a major impact on companies with large IT parks.

The result: chaos of unforeseen proportions ensued as every Windows computer equipped with CrowdStrike cybersecurity tools was turned on between the early hours of Friday morning to start another day of work. In these cases, after turning on the computers, they were faced with the unwelcome blue screens, indicating that the computer needed to be restarted.