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The Crowdstrike "Worker" Who Crippled Microsoft Users Worldwide

While it has become clear that an update to an anti-virus program 'Falcon Sensor' by CrowdStrike was responsible for the massive worldwide outage, people have still been wondering how such a defective update was allowed to be released and who was behind it.

Microsoft outage Edited by Updated: Jul 20, 2024, 1:59 pm
The Crowdstrike

The Crowdstrike "Worker" Who Crippled Microsoft Users Worldwide (image@vinceflibustier)

The global Microsoft outage has unfurled chaos across the globe. The frustration on what has caused the biggest ever IT disruption was ginormous.

While it has become clear that an update to an anti-virus program ‘Falcon Sensor’ by CrowdStrike was responsible for the massive worldwide outage, people have still been wondering how such a defective update was allowed to be released and who was behind it.

This lingering question was what made Vincent Flibustier famous. He paraded himself to be a Crowdstrike employee. He broke the internet with an altered, AI-generated photo of him outside the CrowdStrike office along with the caption, “First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off”.

The picture went viral and has 38 million views as of now.

 

Two hours after posting the picture, he posted another update saying that the company had fired him. He also shared a short video where he takes ‘responsibility’ for causing the global outage.

Flibustier also changed his X (former Twitter) bio to accompany the parody. His bio said, “Former Crowdstrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin”.

Though the man was trying to invoke joke on the situation, in the situation were airlines, banks, TV channels, and several other industries were scrambling to deal with the issue, thousands online bought his satire and thought he was the one responsible for the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on their system. Netizens went into overdrive after finding the ‘culprit’.

Read also: Microsoft Global Outage: From Refrigerators To Flights, Everything Disrupted

While many praised him for giving them a day off from work due to the outage, several other posted abusive messages about him.

However, the truth is, Flibustier is a satirical writer who runs Nordpresse, a Belgian parody news site. He appeared as a guest on France TV, where he remarked, “People are drawn to stories that confirm their preconceptions”.

Explaining why people immediately bought his joke, he said, “No culprit named yet, I bring it on a platter, people like to have a culprit. The culprit seems completely stupid, he is proud of his stupidity, he takes his afternoon off on the first day of work. This falls right into a huge buzz in which people absolutely need to have new information, and a fake is by nature new, you won’t read it anywhere else”.

 

He also added that the post was shared by those who knew it was a joke, but the amplification sent it into a zone where people took every word of the tweet literally.

Read also: Global IT Outage Affects Media, Banks And Airlines

Millions across the globe are still grappling with the issue. Both Microsoft and CrowdStrike trying to resolve the issue at the earliest. Its latest version, Falcon Sensor software was meant to make CrowdStrike clients’ systems more secure against hacking by updating the threats it defends against. However faulty code in the update files resulted in one of the most widespread tech outages in recent years for companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

 

Topics
crowdstrike internet Microsoft 365 Microsoft outage X

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