It may have seemed that the plot of the 2023 film “Leave the World Behind” was becoming reality when most of the planet woke to the news of a global IT meltdown last Friday.Thousands of flights were grounded, airports were in disarray, customers were unable to access their banks or pay for goods using cards, doctors and surgeries were not available to patients… and the list goes on.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike admitted that it caused the outage due to a “defect” in a Microsoft Windows software update. CrowdStrike’s chief executive officer, George Kurtz, said the company’s engineers resolved the issue on the same day.

Launched in 2012, CrowdStrike claims to offer customers “the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform” to detect and block hacking threats. According to its website, the company provides services to 298 companies on the Fortune500 list as well as top tech and automotive companies and healthcare providers.

Although the company found a solution to fix the error, it will take time to rectify as each user must be contacted individually. It is not simply a case of pressing a key to automatically update every user.

Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. It appears to be a Windows update of CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor software, which caused “blue screens of death”: an error message on Windows systems when computer activity is interrupted and reverts to a blue screen.