The global IT outage caused by a failed Crowdstrike software update can apparently be fixed by booting Windows into Safe Mode and deleting a file. This means millions of Windows machines need to be booted and fixed by hand.
This could take days to accomplish and could be extremely costly. No information right now suggests this is a cyberattack. But if it was, it may be a supply chain attack where malicious code was injected into the source code without detection. Nothing to suggest that yet.
Also, this isn’t a “Microsoft outage,” but a bug in an automatic update of Crowdstrike’s software. At this point, only machines running Windows appear to be affected, but the issue is Crowdstrike’s and not Microsoft’s. Windows systems not running Crowdstrike are unaffected.
https://x.com/davetroy