Name: Behind Crowdstrike's global IT meltdown and why the world remains vulnerable 🎧
Uploaded: 2026-01-01T18:26:00.000Z
Duration: 27 min 42 s
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Subscribe to our newsletter CNBC's Daily Open welcome to beyond the Valley, a CNBC tech podcast with Arjun Karpil and Tom Chitty.

Beyond the Valley Last week's IT failure made go down as the worst in history.

Computers around the world began to grind to a halt on Thursday night after a faulty software update with a single defect saw severe disruption to air travel, hospitals, banks and much more.

This week we're going to explain how this happened and the subsequent fallout.

We'll also hear Arjun's firsthand account of his day at CNBC's London offices and how CNBC managed to get on air.

And finally, what does this failure tell us about the vulnerable foundations on which today's economy is built?

The Valley we had a quick chat on Friday lunchtime last week where you said, I think the words were, I've never known a day like it.

So just to give our listeners an idea, kind of, how did the day start?

As you mentioned, like a day unlike I've never experienced before in my career here as a reporter, as a journalist.

And I was scheduled to sort of get in and talk about Netflix earnings.

And what happened was overnight, firstly there was a.

We had heard about issues with Microsoft cloud service, but

before we were scheduled to go on air, people's sort of computers started to crash and there were questions over whether we would get onto air or not.

Anyways, it was all fine in the first hour of Squawkbox, our morning show, and

And after I'd come off air sort of nearer to sort of 7:00am London time, I noticed that my computer had crashed and others too, and

This was the first time mine had kind of crashed, others had earlier on, but

Anyways, these computers started then falling like dominoes at this point and the blue screen of death, as it's called, was appearing.

But at this point we didn't really know what was causing it.

And I was sort of frantically running around the office trying to figure out what had happened at this point because you're in that unique position where you're being affected by this problem, but

you've also got to cover this problem as a journalist that covers tech.

So I mean, how we broke this story and we were actually one of the first in the world to break this story.

But it came from an update issued by a company called CrowdStrike, which we're going to get into.

But the way we found that out, interestingly, was the fact that because it was affecting us, our IT departments globally had been speaking to CrowdStrike support.

And you know, we had got confirmation then from the company via our colleagues at NBC that this was indeed the reason for this global IT meltdown.

And you know, from that moment, I think I ran on air, reported this news on CNBC.com, we got a headline out and the bare bones of information, which was very limited at the time we knew.

We're going to talk more about it, kind of who CrowdStrike are.

I think some people would probably never have heard of CrowdStrike.

But before we do that for our listeners, if you haven't already, you can subscribe to the beyond the Valley weekly newsletter.

Head to cnbc.com beyond the Valley, click on the subscribe button and you'll get a newsletter every Friday with all the best international tech stories from cnbc, including all the events of last week.

And if you want to contact Arjun and I or have a question about a past episode, then email us@BeyondTheValleyMBC.com I know this is a sort of crowbar episode because of what happened at the end of last week, but

Weird to just do it on my own considering last few episodes I've been competing against someone far, far more intelligent than myself.

Okay, let's, let's get into the, into the bones of it.

So CrowdStrike are a cybersecurity company effectively.

And they us us based cybersecurity company that sells cybersecurity software aimed at businesses at the core.

And their owner is a, is a billionaire, George Kurtz.

And the company is worth billions of dollars.

So this isn't just some small, you know, firm.

This is a firm that, you know, supports the, the security of Microsoft and, and

the security of organizations across the world.

That's, that's the more important part the equation is that it's not a small firm.

Lots and lots and lots of global businesses rely on CrowdStrike for their security.

And that's why this whole episode was quite a big ordeal and why it was so widespread.

There was also something that happened before the CrowdStrike thing, right.

So the timeline is quite important, I think.

So I got into the office Friday morning, London time, overnight our time, so late us Microsoft had issued an update saying that their Azure cloud services were facing some problems and that there could be disruption to certain Microsoft cloud based apps, you know, like teams, for example.

So is that what you were talking about when you had your first kind of update that you needed to do?

But when you first came into the office, what we found out later was that was completely wholly unrelated to what followed with CrowdStrike, which then probably confused countless of IT managers, engineers, you know, when, when this was happening because they're probably thinking, oh, it must be related to, to the update we did earlier, right?

So they, they, you know, there were questions over whether this was a Microsoft.

I had first seen that and thought it was a Microsoft issue, the reason why Windows crashed on my PC.

But then as we started to get more information, we found out it was to do with CrowdStrike.

And this specific issue was this CrowdStrike software called Falcon.

This is what they call an endpoint monitoring product.

So it's effectively a piece of software designed to protect what they call endpoints.

It's a jargony term in the cybersecurity industry.

Basically means your laptop means your PC, means smartphone means something, an end device, the recipient at the end of the line in the process of creating, it's that device at the end of the line.

So it's designed to protect PCs, laptops, etc.

this is normal for cybersecurity firms is they have to issue updates very often because the cybersecurity landscape and the threats are constantly changing.

The different ways hackers might attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in machines, etc.

So they have to update regularly the patches and the defense against these kind of new vectors of attack.

And therefore a mundane update they issued which was to roll out across their customers globally is what they did.

Now these are, you know, if you've got a smartphone, your smartphone sometimes automatically updates overnight, right.

This is very similar to what happened there.

It was, it was almost an automatic scheduled update that was due to come in.

The problem was the fact that the company CrowdStrike has to constantly update its offering is also where the weakness stems from.

And they issued an update that had buggy code in it, effectively defective code.

This cyber security software are quite special because they're trying to protect an organization's entire infrastructure.

They need deep access into the, the kernel, the kernel.