Microsoft Outage or Cyber ​​Attack?

People did face difficulties due to the worldwide shutdown of Microsoft 365 services. This is having a major impact on the aviation sector, banking services and other emergency services. An update by CrowdStrike is being said to be the reason for this entire outage.

CrowdStrike is a cyber security company that works to protect Microsoft and many other platforms from cyber attacks. The company had released a major update, due to which people are facing this problem. At the same time, some people are linking it to a cyber attack.

What is the problem?

On Friday morning(19/07/2024), millions of systems working on Windows started facing the problem of blue screen or shutdown. CrowdStrike is believed to be the reason for this problem, which has released its new update. The configuration went wrong in this update, due to which Microsoft 365 users are being affected.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has written a post about this on X. He have written that they are working closely with their customers. This problem has happened due to an update released for Windows hosts. It has not affected Mac and Linux. This is not a cyber attack.

Technical glitch or hacking?

Many people also have this question whether this is just a technical glitch or the systems around the world have come to a standstill due to a cyber attack. Users are also raising this question on the social media platform X. Cyber ​​experts also believe the same.

Cyber ​​experts are not clearly calling it a cyber attack. But they are also not ruling out its possibility. Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET, said that this is a technical fault of CrowdStrike, but he has not ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack.

What is its connection with Russia?

The company who came up with updates was started in the year 2012. It was started by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston. Dmitri Alperovitch is its co-founder as well as former CTO. His family shifted from Russia to America in 1994. Born in 1980, Dmitri Alperovitch separated from this company in February 2020. He had also made some speculations about the Russia-Ukraine war. Russia has banned him from entering its country.

Such posts are constantly being seen on social media in which it is being said that this is a kind of cyber attack. Many experts also agree with this. Because whenever a cyber attack has happened, such cases have been seen. In a cyber attack, attackers affect the service. There are many ways to stop the service, one of which is a DDOS attack. In this type of attack also, the server is affected by giving multiple requests simultaneously.

However, this case is different from this, because here it has happened due to the update. But the big question is how did Microsoft allow CrowdStrike to push such a big update worldwide without testing?

When any company releases an update for a system, it is first dry run and the update is pushed to a few systems first. After pushing the update, it is seen whether any problem is occurring or not. Even after this, when the update is pushed at this level, it is done in stages so that even if a problem occurs, there is not much service impact.

This is also giving strength to the news of cyber attack that how did this problem occur on such a large scale. Experts are also demanding a high level investigation of this matter so that it can be clear whether this is really a mistake or someone’s conspiracy or cyber attack.