US cybersecurity watchdog slams CrowdStrike for causing worldwide IT outage

A senior US government cybersecurity official has slammed CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. for making “a serious mistake” by pushing a defective update that crashed the systems of businesses and governments globally.

“It was a huge deal with serious impacts on critical infrastructure operations across the world,” said Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a LinkedIn post published on Saturday.

“Any company that builds any kind of software should design, test and deliver it with a priority on dramatically driving down the number of flaws,” she said.

The faulty software update affected 8.5 million devices globally that rely on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Microsoft Corp. revealed the scope of the worldwide IT outage for the first time in a blog post on Saturday, saying those affected represented fewer than 1% of all devices that use Windows.

Easterly, whose agency has previously censured Microsoft for multiple cybersecurity failures and a series of embarrassing hacks, made clear in her post that Friday’s outage “was not a Microsoft issue.”