Technical Post-Mortem on the July 19th CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor Outage: A Detailed Overview with Microsoft Architecture Insights

Incident Overview

On July 19, 2024, at 04:09 UTC, CrowdStrike released a routine sensor configuration update to Windows systems as part of the ongoing protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This particular update, however, inadvertently introduced a logic error that led to system crashes and Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) on affected systems. The issue was identified and remediated by 05:27 UTC the same day.

Global IT System Crashes after CrowdStrike update hits Microsoft.

Timeline of Events

• 04:09 UTC: Sensor configuration update released.
• 04:09–05:27 UTC: Impact window where affected systems could download the faulty update.
• 05:27 UTC: Remediation applied, resolving the issue.

Impact Assessment

The incident primarily affected customers running Falcon sensor for Windows version 7.11 and above. Systems online during the update window and which downloaded the configuration file were susceptible to crashes.