Update: Widespread CrowdStrike “Outages” Explained – Possible Election Implications
In the early hours of Friday morning, not long after President Trump concluded his speech at the RNC Convention, news began to pour out on social media about “IT outages” across not just the country, but the globe. Major US airlines Delta, American Airlines and United Air grounded flights. As of this writing, Delta has resumed “some flight departures,” while American Airlines and United Airlines have said they’ve resumed normal operations, but expect delays.
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In the early hours of Friday morning, not long after President Trump concluded his speech at the RNC Convention, news began to pour out on social media about “IT outages” across not just the country, but the globe. Major US airlines Delta, American Airlines and United Air grounded flights. As of this writing, Delta has resumed “some flight departures,” while American Airlines and United Airlines have said they’ve resumed normal operations, but expect delays.
While the airlines seem to be operating at normal or somewhat normal capacity, the FAA’s National Airspace System Status has added to their list of impacted airports. This list is subject to change.
The “outages” have impacted banks, hospitals, police and emergency services, media, among others.
The source of the problem has been identified by CrowdStrike as having to do with the Falcon platform. Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company who was a critical component in the Democrat-led and Democrat-funded “Russia Hoax.”
CrowdStrike put out a statement on their website:
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack.
The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.
We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.
CrowdStrike, who’s website proclaims them “Cybersecurity’s AI-Native Platform for the XDR Era-We Stop Breaches,” stated they identified the problematic file, singular, and offer several solutions to remedy the problem, including creating a back-up of the disk volume before proceeding.
Mark Cook is a computer expert who has been investigating election machines, infrastructure and procedures since the 2020 Election. On his website, HandCountRoadShow.org, he offered an explanation in layman’s terms, describing the Falcon Platform’s “Falcon Sensor” as a “part of their Cloud-based endpoint protection platform”:
Think of Endpoint Protection as a firewall on each device that is part of a network. The ‘cloud’ part of it is similar to a conductor in a orchestra, with the endpoints being those playing the instruments, and the instruments are the individual computers/servers.
According to Cook, the “Blue Screen of Death” experienced globally after the “outage” is caused by an update that conflicted with Microsoft Windows, causing machines to get “stuck during reboot,” preventing them from loading the operation software.
In terms of potential impact on our election, Cook writes:
The idiots that implemented our cloud-based voter registration and poll-book systems have created a HUGE abuse vector in our election ecosystem and I’d be shocked if those election systems weren’t also affected by this. And there is nothing that can prevent their being another accidental (or intentional) abuse! Have you considered that this may just be cover for an election hack just prior to/during an election? It would be perfect cover.
He notes in his article a post on X from Katie Hobbs of Arizona regarding the impacts on Arizona, while Maricopa County Elections put out a similar statement that some voting locations have been impacted. Arizona’s primary elections are on July 30th, but, lets be real, its now “Election Month”, not “Election Day,” so of course early voting begins 28 days prior to the 30th.
— Maricopa County Elections (@MaricopaVote) July 19, 2024
Cook offers his advice on how to fix these systems as well. And it is a little more concerning than the watered-down version mentioned earlier:
The affected file in the update is a particular ‘driver’ that was updated. A ‘driver’ is a program that runs on the computer that performs a task. This driver is the Falcon driver. To repair it, the affected ‘driver’ must be removed in order to allow the operating system to boot up, then the new fixed version of the driver must be installed. The huge complication here is that the driver must be removed MANUALLY. A further complication is for servers that have encrypted hard drives because extra steps must be performed to decrypt the hard drive in order for the repair to be implemented. For companies that didn’t follow best-practices on their encryption passwords, their systems will be permanently locked out and unrecoverable.
Cook goes on to list a step-by-step for remedying the problem on his website.
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