Fake Crowdstrike employee takes blame for Microsoft outage, spills beans later

CrowdStrike had sent an alert to its clients on July 19 that its widely used "Falcon Sensor" software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen.

A global tech failure disrupted operations across multiple industries on July 19, halting flights and upending everything from banking to health care systems.

CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity company, had sent an alert to its clients at 0530 GMT on July 19 that its widely used "Falcon Sensor" software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.

Taking the blame for the chaos, an X user Vincent Flibustier, posing as a new employee of Crowdstrike, shared a post saying, "First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off (sic)."

The post had a picture showing him outside the office of CrowdStrike.

In continued threads to his X post, Vincent claimed that he had been fired for an unfair reason.

He wrote, "Fired. Totally unfair."

In the next thread, Vincent explains as to how and why he was fired.

"It was my very first day on the job as a new system admin and I was very eager and excited. Let's say I actually made a small update to a line of code, optimised an update slightly a little bit and maybe I shouldn't have. I got fired so I was called in," Vincent explains in the video.

"They called me back today, telling me that I really need to come back. It really wasn't even to congratulate me. I thought it was as if it was so. Now, I'm just waiting for my termination documentation. They told me that you should never put an update into production without testing, especially not on a Friday, and I said, 'Well, it's not Friday; it was Thursday, and today is Friday."

Looking for a job, Vincent in his further thread, wrote, "Hello @elonmusk do you have a job for me? Please RT so M. Elon Musk can see it."

Vincent in his threads, also shared the code which he allegedly used to optimise, by showing it in a picture.

He wrote, "A lot of you asked the line of code I changed to optimize, here it is."

It soon came to light that it was not Vincent because of whom the outage had happened. It was instead a faulty update by CrowdStrike itself, which led to the global tech failure.

Spilling the beans, Vincent said that he offered a ready-made culprit on a platter to social media.

He mentioned that his picture outside the Crowdstrike office is AI generated and explained the psychology behind his deed.

Vincent also told that how it was easy to fool the audience saying that its actually 'funny that people believe something because they like it'.

President and CEO of Crowdstrike had on X said, "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 is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

The global tech outage had affected operations in different sectors internationally including at Spanish, Italian, and Indian airports, US airlines, as well as Australian media and banks.

The governments of Australia, New Zealand, and a number of US states were facing issues, while American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines (UAL.O), and Allegiant Air (ALGT.O) grounded flights citing communication problems.

In Britain, Sky News, one of the country's major television news channels, went off air for hours on Friday before service was restored.

Microsoft said that it had fixed the underlying cause for the outage of its 365 apps and services including Teams and OneDrive, but residual impact was affecting some services.