Why are home computers not affected by CrowdStrick?
The problem is that this blue screen did not appear once, but several times, which put computers in a vicious cycle of reboots, and consequently - the problem - caused Microsoft to lose about $ 60 billion (even though it was not responsible), not to mention CrowdStrike losing billions as well because it was the main cause of the problem. But there is a puzzling question: How did this problem affect major companies and institutions and not even affect home computers? To answer this question, we will need to know the details from the beginning.
CrowdStrike problem in Windows
First: Crowd Strike 2024 Incident
Last Friday morning, July 19, 2024, many organizations woke up to the blue screen problem we talked about in the introduction and the world witnessed an unprecedented technical crisis; more than a billion Windows computers were affected by this crisis, and the focus was on “Windows” because all other devices running Linux, Mac or any other operating system were not affected. Microsoft is innocent of this crisis and the main culprit was the cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 and has been providing security services to tech giants around the world, such as Microsoft, ever since. The company has a popular security platform called Falcon, which is specifically designed to repel cyber attacks and the malware they try to spread. In short, the whole problem happened because of an update to this platform , specifically because of the file "C-00000291*.sys", which CrowdStrike recommended deleting from the system files by booting Windows in Safe Mode.
Fortunately, the problem has already been solved, and even regular users know that the solution lies in deleting the aforementioned file, as we explained, not to mention that Microsoft has developed a tool to solve this problem by automatically deleting the update file for those who cannot delete it manually for one reason or another.
Second: Why were home computers not affected?
Windows powers more than 72% of personal computers , yet we haven’t seen regular users complain about what global institutions and companies have suffered. This may not make sense to some, as personal computers are more affected than large corporate computers, right? Not exactly, according to experts, CrowdStrike doesn’t offer its services to personal computer users, nor even to companies or institutions with fewer than 1,000 employees.
It simply has nothing to do with Microsoft as much as it does with the third-party company CrowdStrike, and there is a misconception that many people need to correct, which is that this global crisis is not the result of a security issue, i.e. it is not a hack or anything like that; it is just a technical issue resulting from an update error, specifically in the format of one of the files, and therefore the Windows system did not recognize it and entered the closed “restart” loop and the blue screen.
Bottom line: The CrowdStrike problem didn’t affect home computers because the company doesn’t offer its – very expensive – security services to individuals, but rather to large companies and institutions that care about protecting their data from security attacks. Fortunately, this problem is over and the important thing is that companies have learned their lesson.