What is CrowdStrike, and what happened?
On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines across the globe, is linked to just one software company: CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike plays an important role in helping companies find and prevent security breaches, billing itself as having the “fastest mean time” to detect threats. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening,...