‘We just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems’ – Musk

The antivirus platform has acknowledged that a bug in an update was to blame for Friday’s global Windows 10 outage

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that his companies stopped using web/cloud-based antivirus platform CrowdStrike in the wake of Friday’s global Windows 10 outage. The cyber-security firm has admitted that the massive failures were caused by a recent update that conflicted with Microsoft systems.

The IT meltdown affected Windows 10 users around the world, including airports, banks, and broadcasters. According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, at least 4,295 flights were grounded globally due to the outage. The worldwide glitch also hit a number of media outlets, including the UK-based Sky News – which went off the air for a while – as well as the Australian-based ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9, and News Corp Australia.

Responding to a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday, Musk wrote: “We just deleted Crowdstrike from all our systems.”

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Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, confirmed on X that a CrowdStrike update was to blame for Friday’s outage, adding that Microsoft was providing “customers [with] technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”

Musk replied to the statement, saying: “This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain.”

Commenting on a Financial Times report on the global Windows 10 outage, the US-based billionaire said in a separate post that this was the “biggest IT fail ever.”

The tech tycoon also concurred with Christopher Stanley, the head of security engineering at X and a principal security engineer at SpaceX, who described Friday’s events as a “wake up reminder that you shouldn’t have an internet connected privileged binary running on your production systems.”

“What was a bad update could have easily been a massive adversary backdoor. A third party vendor will always be the weakest link,” he warned.

Speaking to NBC on Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said his company is “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected” by the outage.

“We’ve identified it very quickly… The systems come back online as they are rebooted,” he stated, adding that CrowdStrike is working with its customers to help them return to normal operations.