The CrowdStrike IT outage is pretty grim but let's hope it's not as bad as the infamous Dyn DDoS attack, Facebook mega-crash, and Rogers network disaster

A stylized, rendered image of the Earth (focus on Europe) represented by little dots, binary code and lines.

With millions of people around the world affected by the apparent bug in CrowdStrike's Falcon software—bringing down IT systems in media, hospitals, and airports around the world—there's a good chance it will go down in the annals of tech history as being the worst outage ever, putting it ahead of the likes of 2016 Dyn DDoS cyberattack, Facebook's server woes in 2021, and Canada's biggest IT failure ever in 2022.

While it's not fully clear exactly how or why millions of PCs went into an endless BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) cycle overnight, the culprit appears to be a bug in a security update for a piece of software developed by CrowdStrike, called Falcon. Somewhat ironically designed to prevent malware and other cyberattacks, it's a salient reminder that the modern world is almost entirely reliant on client computers, servers, and the Internet.