“What is CrowdStrike? Why is my Windows computer showing the Blue Screen of Death? Who’s responsible for the biggest IT outage ever?”.
These are the questions that have become a topic of discussion across the world after a mistake by Microsoft led to a massive outage of Windows computers. While it has now been revealed that an update to the anti-virus program ‘Falcon Sensor’ by CrowdStrike was responsible for the massive outage across the world, people are still wondering how such a faulty update was allowed to be released and who was behind it.
Vincent Flibustier, an X user pretending to be a CrowdStrike employee. Vincent took the internet by storm with a modified, AI-generated photo of himself outside the CrowdStrike office, along with the caption, “First day at CrowdStrike, did a little update and took the afternoon off.”
First day at CrowdStrike, gave a little update and took the afternoon off ✌️ pic.twitter.com/bOs4qAKwu0
— Vincent Flibustier? (@vinceflibustier) July 19, 2024
This photo went viral within a few minutes and till now it has received almost 4 lakh likes and more than 36,000 people have shared it.
Two hours later, Flibustier posted another update – the company had fired him. He also shared a short video in which he took ‘responsibility’ for the global outage.
Vincent Flibustier changed his ex’s (former Twitter) bio to go along with the parody. His bio read, “Former CrowdStrike employee, fired for unfair reason, changed only 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as a systems administrator.”
While he was trying to joke about it, thousands of people bought his satire online and thought he was responsible for the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on their systems. Airlines, banks, TV channels and many other industries were struggling to deal with the issue, and people on social media went into a frenzy after finding the ‘culprit’.
While many users praised him for ensuring they didn’t have to work on Friday, some posted abusive messages about him.
The truth: Vincent is a satirist who runs a Belgian parody news site called NordPress. He appeared as a guest on France TV, where he said, “People are attracted to stories that confirm their preconceptions.”
Elaborating on why the internet immediately embraced his joke, he said, “There’s no culprit named yet, I serve it to them on a platter, people like criminals. The culprit seems like a total idiot, he’s proud of his stupidity, he takes the afternoon off from work on the first day. It’s a huge discussion that requires people to have brand new information, and a fake information is new by nature, you won’t read it anywhere else.”
He also added that the post was shared by people who knew it was a joke, but it was blown out of proportion to such an extent that people took every word of the tweet literally.
Millions of users around the world are still experiencing issues, with both Microsoft and CrowdStrike trying to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
The latest version of its Falcon sensor software was intended to make CrowdStrike clients’ systems more secure against hacking by updating the threats it defends against. However faulty code in the update files resulted in one of the most widespread technical disruptions in recent years for companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Problems emerged soon after the update was released on Friday, with users posting photos on social media of computers with blue screens displaying error messages. These are known in the industry as “blue screens of death.”
