A CrowdStrike meme bonanza has taken hold of the internet after an update from the security giant took out computers around the globe. According to the company, there was a defect in the update software that produced blue screens of death on Microsoft devices across many industries, leaving office workers with little to do but post memes about it.
As news of the outages spread, even those who were not impacted by the CrowdStrike defect started joking about how disappointed they were to have to go into work on Friday, July 19.
Also known as the Microsoft outage meme, the gags referencing this technological catastrophe largely consist of reaction images and gifs predicting the dire situation for IT workers everywhere and speculating on the kind of person who pushed out this defective update.
It's already mixing with other meme formats, including the "this is fine" comic and even the recent "I'm sick" meme from President Joe Biden's recent COVID diagnosis. Others are posting video clips of people crying to represent those whose workplaces are fully functional because they don't use CrowdStrike.
Reports of the problem with Microsoft devices that use CrowdStrike's flagship security product, Falcon Sensor, began in the late hours of Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Australia. As the rest of the world arrived to work, more nations reported the same problem in which updating their computers resulted in a "reboot loop" that kept producing the blue screen error message telling users that their PCs had a problem and needed to restart.
The problem is that the update that kept loading from CrowdStrike was causing the problem that resulted in the devices crashing. Unable to do much else, workers hopped onto their personal phones to report on social media that there was a massive tech problem impacting healthcare companies, airlines, banks, train stations, and numerous Fortune 500 companies.
Most of the CrowdStrike memes hit social media in the early hours of July 19.
Before you panic, CrowdStrike says that it has already identified the precise problem and have configured a fix that should resolve the issue on all devices. However, this does not necessarily mean that everything was instantly back to normal for everybody. Some companies, depending on how heavily they relied on Falcon software, were hit harder than others.
"It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover," said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
This is because the fix must be applied manually — it won't just go away next time the affected devices are switched on again. Companies will have to hope that they have a robust and competent IT department.
Perhaps due to the seeming connection between everything in our lives breaking down, nearly every other CrowdStrike meme references a recent pair of tweets by Joe Biden announcing that he has COVID-19. On July 17, the President tweeted "I'm sick" and followed it up with another post reading "of Elon Musk and his rich buddies trying to buy this election."
"And if you agree, pitch in here," he added alongside a donation link.
Two days later, Twitter users are creating fake screenshots of CrowdStrike tweets with the same format. "I'm sick," reads one such meme, "of waiting until Monday to push the prod."
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