Fake Crowdstrike employee takes blame for Microsoft outage, but later speaks out

A global technical outage disrupted operations across multiple sectors on July 19, halting air travel and upending everything from banking to healthcare.

CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity company, sent out a warning to its customers on July 19 at 05:30 GMT that its widely used software “Falcon Sensor” causes Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, informally known as the “Blue Screen of Death”.

X user Vincent Flibustier blamed himself for the chaos, posing as a new Crowdstrike employee and sharing a post that read: “First day at Crowdstrike, made a small update and took the afternoon off.”

The post included a photo of him in front of the CrowdStrike office.

In the threads that followed his X-post, Vincent claimed he was fired for unfair reasons.

He wrote: “Fired. Completely unjustified.”

In the following topic Vincent explains how and why he was fired.

“It was my very first day on the job as a new sysadmin and I was very excited and excited. Let’s say I made a small update to a line of code, optimized an update a little bit and maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I got fired, so I got called in,” Vincent explains in the video.

“They called me back today and said I really needed to come back. It wasn’t even to congratulate me. I thought it was. Now I’m just waiting for my deprecation documentation. They said you should never put an update into production without testing, especially on a Friday, and I said, ‘Well, it’s not Friday; it was Thursday, and today is Friday.'”

Looking for a job, Vincent wrote in his next thread: “Hi @elonmusk do you have a job for me? Please respond so M. Elon Musk can see it.”

Vincent also shared in his threads the code he reportedly used to optimize, showing it in an image.

He wrote: “Many of you asked which line of code I modified to optimize. Here it is.”

It soon became apparent that it was not Vincent that was causing the outage, but a faulty update to CrowdStrike itself, which led to the global technical outage.

Vincent said he had presented social media with a ready-made culprit on a silver platter.

He said his photo outside Crowdstrike’s office was generated by AI and explained the psychology behind his act.

Vincent also said that it was easy to fool the audience by saying that it’s actually ‘funny that people believe something because they like it’.

Crowdstrike President and CEO had said on X: “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been implemented.”

The global outage affected operations across sectors worldwide, including Spanish, Italian and Indian airports, US airlines, and Australian media and banks.

The governments of Australia, New Zealand and several US states faced problems, while American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines (UAL.O) and Allegiant Air (ALGT.O) grounded flights due to communications problems.

In Great Britain, Sky Newsone of the country’s largest television news channels was off the air for hours on Friday before resuming service.

Microsoft said it had fixed the underlying cause of the outages across its 365 apps and services, including Teams and OneDrive, but that there were still residual effects on some services.