CrowdStrike blames bug that caused worldwide outage on faulty testing software

The faulty update caused an out-of-bounds memory read that triggered an 'unrecoverable exception.'

CrowdStrike has blamed faulty testing software for a buggy update that crashed 8.5 million Windows machines around the world, it wrote in an post incident review (PIR). "Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two [updates] passed validation despite containing problematic data," the company said. It promised a series of new measures to avoid a repeat of the problem.

The massive BSOD (blue screen of death) outage impacted multiple companies worldwide including airlines, broadcasters, the London Stock Exchange and many others. The problem forced Windows machines into a boot loop, with technicians requiring local access to machines to recover (Apple and Linux machines weren't affected). Many companies, like Delta Airlines, are still recovering.

By Steve Dent.

Full story at Engadget.