BUFFALO, N.Y. — To get a better understanding of what really happened with this worldwide computer outage we turned to professor Kevin Cleary, who specializes in Information Management Studies and Science with the University at Buffalo School of Management.
First off, Microsoft and Windows are not to blame in this case, according to Cleary.
"CrowdStrike is a piece of software that is separate from Microsoft. It's kind of a bolt-on product," Cleary said. "Originally a lot of folks were saying, 'Oh here's a Microsoft issue,' because the error screen itself was a Microsoft error screen. But what was actually causing that was the CrowdStrike security software, and it made Windows panic and go into this well-known blue screen mode."
The ever-popular Windows program is found in servers for all those large-scale business and organization systems, so there was a major, global impact in our pre-dawn hours.
"This started at the start of business hours on the other side of the world," Cleary said. "And so we had several hours, at least on the times zones that are outside of U.S. time zones, to be able to deal with this and respond to it. And for their parts, Microsoft and CrowdStrike did respond fairly early and issue statements and fixes really early.
"It's just taking time to implement those fixes when all your systems you would use to implement those fixes are also on fire and offline."
It is ironic that this Cloud-based system called CrowdStrike, designed to protect our business computer systems from cyberattacks, could also cause them to crash.
But Professor Cleary says it doesn't take much.
"I've done my time in operational IT where just he smallest mistake, a single line of code can have major, major ripple effects, and I think that's why, unfortunately, what we're seeing here is a probably small, little mistake that just a huge amplification," Cleary said.
CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz told NBC News, "We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue, and as systems come back on line., and as they're rebooted, they're coming up, and they're working."
Of course, that is easier said then done for reboots of all those industrial-strength and industrial-sized servers, which may even have encrypted files. Some fixes are taking a longer time.
And you may remember, the AT&T cellphone outage in February, which was also a software update glitch, and perhaps also these incidents provide lessons for IT staffers about something that is even worse.
"It gives us a real good taste of what a cyberattack might look like. They're probably following the same type of procedures and strategies to fix that as though it were a cyberattack," Cleary said.