CrowdStrike accepts a ‘mistake’ led to ‘blue screen of death’ worldwide chaos

The company responsible for the “blue screen of death” that left millions of people stranded says it’s “absolutely” prepared for compensation claims.

The company responsible for the “blue screen of death” that impacted millions of people on Friday is accepting there’s a possibility compensation could be rolled out for lost income.

The outage hit Australia about 3pm (AEST) after a planned Microsoft upgrade malfunctioned, throwing millions of people and businesses into chaos.

CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas has explained for the first time what triggered the “blue screen of death” that left millions of people unable to use Microsoft products on Friday.

“I personally apologise for what happened. We understand the disruption and the distress that we caused a lot of people,” Mr Sentonas told Sky News Australia.

CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas says the company is 'absolutely' prepared for compensation and class action discussion. Picture: Sky News

“And firstly, I think it’s important to say we put out an update, which we do regularly, and we’ve been doing for over a decade, and we’ve got this very wrong.

“We identified what the issue was very quickly. We stopped that particular file from being propagated.

“But unfortunately, a lot of people around the world did get access to that file.

“And what it did is it exposed a logic flaw which ended up in, what the industry knows of and the experience that people had, which is a blue screen of death.

“We put in a fix very quickly, but that fixes to the file. It obviously didn’t fix the machines that were impacted in the field.”

Businesses, eftpos services, airlines, banks, supermarkets and media organisations such as News Corp’s global operations, the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and Network 10 were impacted by the outage.

The ‘blue screen of death’ no one wants to see. Picture: Supplied

The shutdown also impacted New Zealand, Japan, India, the US and the UK.

Mr Sentonas said the company was “absolutely” prepared for potential class actions and compensation following the widespread outages.

“And as I said, those conversations have to happen and will happen,” he said.

“That phase will come after we get our customers remediated.

“This was a mistake that we made. And we will learn from that mistake.”

Mr Sentonas said CrowdStrike was already working to understand how to prevent future outages.

“And our commitment to our customers is to work very closely with them, to demonstrate to them we understand what happened, to demonstrate to them and help them understand what exactly went wrong in this particular case,” he said.

“But I think the important part is really spending time to demonstrate how we make sure it doesn’t happen again. And that’s going to be the focus.”

Originally from Melbourne, Mr Sentonas leads the Texas-based publicly listed cybersecurity company after serving as chief technical officer from 2020 to 2023.