Last Friday, a major CrowdStrike outage impacted PCs running Microsoft Windows, causing worldwide issues affecting airlines, retailers, banks, hospitals, rail networks, and more. Computers were stuck in continuous recovery loops, rendering them unusable.
The failure was caused by an update to the CrowdStrike Falcon antivirus software that auto-installed on Windows 10 PCs, but Mac and Linux machines were not affected even though they received the same software. A report from The Wall Street Journal delves into what happened and includes some critical information from Microsoft on why Macs did not get taken out by the update.
On Windows machines, CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software is a kernel module, which gives the software full access to a PC. The kernel manages memory, processes, files, and devices, and it’s basically the heart of the operating system. Much of the software on a PC is typically limited to user mode, where bad code can’t cause harm, but software with kernel mode access can cause catastrophic total machine failures, like what was encountered last week.
Read more at MacRumors.com