Worldwide disruption This security company triggered a gigantic computer chaos

Crowdstrike is one of the world's leading IT security companies that fend off cyber attacks. Now the service provider has apparently caused problems for customers with a faulty update.

"Falcon Sensor" - the product name of the IT security service from the Texas-based company Crowdstrike promises the sharpness of a hawk's eye to ward off threats. The security monitoring solution is designed to detect and prevent threats at an early stage.

Falcon Sensor" is a system that monitors activities in real time and is designed to block attacks. Security expert Jürgen Schmidt from Heise Security describes it as "a kind of next-generation antivirus program" that is primarily used by large companies. "End customers do not generally use such systems. Nevertheless, they do encounter the problems that arise for service providers, companies and authorities as a result of their use."

Just how widespread Crowdstrike's security solution is worldwide could be seen on Friday morning. For many Crowdstrike customers, nothing worked at all because their computers only displayed the infamous "Bluescreen of Death" error message and no longer booted up. Many users who are not direct customers of Crowdstrike but use the Microsoft 365 service, for example, were also affected.

Share under pressure

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz allayed fears on X that his company had itself been the victim of a cyberattack: "This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The problem has been identified, isolated and a fix provided." Crowdstrike is actively working with customers affected by a defect found in a single update for Windows computers. Mac and Linux computers were not affected.

The company boss will still have to face many critical questions in the coming days. The automatic deployment of a faulty update that crashes many thousands of computers worldwide could point to shortcomings in quality assurance. Crowdstrike shareholders also want to hear conclusive answers. The company's shares came under pressure following the global computer problems. On Friday morning, the stock fell by around 15 percent on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange compared to the previous day.

The market for endpoint protection solutions is dominated by companies from the USA. Crowdstrike competes with players such as Broadcom, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, Trend Micro, Mandiant (formerly FireEye) and Cisco. The Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure is at least one major competitor from Europe.