CrowdStrike president accepts 'Most Epic Fail' award over world's largest IT outage

The CrowdStrike outage knocked out approximately 8.5 million Windows machines around the world, some of which were running critical infrastructure such as emergency services, hospitals, and airports.

The outage was caused by a faulty driver update that was rolled out to CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software. The update resulted in an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines being thrown into boot loops that called for physical intervention to be fixed. The fix, being relatively simple, was the cherry on top of the scenario as all an individual would need to do is boot the machine into Windows Recovery Mode / Safe Mode and delete some files from the CrowdStrike's install folder.

However, this was a nightmare for IT people responsible for thousands of machines. The outage cost Delta approximately $500 million, and the estimated 8.5 million Windows machines that were taken down is an estimation based on CrowdStrike customers that have opted into crash reports, which means it's at least 8.5 million, not total.

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In a hilarious turn of events, CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas has accepted the 2024 Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail, an award that is given out each year at DEF CON to the biggest security blunder of the year. The sheer size of this outage is yet to be fully realized, with the estimations putting total loss of global revenue to be around $15 billion, making it the biggest IT outage in the world.

"Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving. I think the team was surprised when I said straight away that I'd be coming to get it. We got this horribly wrong, we've said that a number of different times. It's super important to own it when you do things well, it's super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong, which we did in this case," said Sentonas