Microsoft Outage: What caused ’Blue Screen of Death’? Nervous CrowdStrike CEO flusters in response | Viral video

Microsoft outage: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz got nervous and seemed uncomfortable, when questioned how a single update caused the ‘blue screen of death’ error for millions of Window users on July 19, Friday. A clip from the video has gone viral, as the CEO had to resort to gulps of water before he could answer the question.

In an interview with NBC’s Today TV, the host pressed George Kurtz on how one single update could lead to such a critical failure. The clip shows a flustered Kurtz taking long pauses, as he stammered, and offered limited explanations.

On Friday, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor update caused global outages, as Windows users experienced the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, causing systems to restart.

‘Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart’ message flashed across screens while industries from finance and banking, to airlines and health came to a standstill.

The show host took a look back at Kurtz’ statement made earlier, and asked a pressing question.“According to your statement, it was a single content update that has managed to shut down air travel, credit card payment systems, banks, broadcast, street lights, 911, emergency around the globe. Why is there not some kind of redundancy or some sort of backup? How is it that one single software bug can have such a profound and immediate impact?” probed the anchor

A flustered CEO, reaching for a bottle of water, came as an immediate response.While Kurtz had started his answer with the complexities of looking at cybersecurity, he stammered before coming to the important part of the question.

While the outage had disrupted 8.5 million Windows devices, Mac and Linux hosts had not been affected. Earlier, CrowdStrike CEO Kurtz, on X, had also reassured its customers, and stakeholders that Mac and Linux hosts had been functioning without any technical snag.