The Global CrowdStrike Conspiracy
Why a little knowledge can be a bad thing...
The world’s largest technical outage happened on July 19th 2024 when 8.5 million devices were rendered incapacitated because of an update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor. Of those 8.5 million devices, a couple of them were needed for somewhat useful things like managing flights, handling payments, broadcasting television, or even accessing patient medical records. The estimated global loss of this event is estimated at around $1.5bn and isn’t likely to be soon forgotten.
While there’s a lot here for any person to unpack on the cultural impact, financial loss, lessons to be learned in reliability engineering etc. what really fascinated me about this was the insane theorycrafting from conspiracy nuts meticulous connection of dots from online free-thinkers who believed they had stumbled upon another example of the ‘New World Order’ keeping the common man down.
Come with me as we explore some enlightening examples of this. Feel free to skip the recap if you’re familiar with the incident.
A Brief Recap
For those not in the know, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that delivers a good hunk of its services through the installation and distribution of a piece of software known as an ‘agent’ onto a device. This agent helps to manage the device and collect useful information. When installed across all your devices, you can manage them all at once without having to access each one individually. Handy!
On July 19th, as intended, an automated update was pushed to all of these agents to increase security capabilities. Unfortunately, due to a little issue in the configuration, this caused a system crash on Windows devices that we lovingly call the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ (BSoD). Not handy!
Even worse, because the update was present on the system every time it tried to boot, it was constantly being forced to blue screen and could never actually enter into any useful state where it could be remotely managed. The solution? Access each device individually to boot into safe mode and remove the agent or force an update. Somewhat easy on one device. Not easy if you have hundreds or thousands, all geographically separated.
Thus created, one of the greatest technical sh*tstorms of the modern era.
The Conspiracy
With any technical incident that gets widespread attention, and specifically one that had a noticeable impact on the non-techie folk, it doesn’t take long for people to start talking and wondering why. Standing too long in an airline security queue will do that to you. Smashing two neurons together at incredible speed has led people to see ‘Windows’ and ‘outage’ and identified the culprit as none other than Bill Gates.
But who is Bill Gates, really? The average person may tell you they are:
The founder and former CEO of Microsoft
Philanthropic multi-billionaire
Co-Founder of charitable venture The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
But on another undefined end of the spectrum, Bill Gates is a far more sinister character who is known for:
Funding and planning COVID-19 to sell vaccines that would cause death, infertility, and/or contain devices to track you - codenamed ‘The Great Reset’
Being a prolific purveyor of Satanism
and also has a kinda’ cliché agenda to block out the sun.
And of course, most recently on July 19th, 2024; humanity received a grim reminder of how much control Bill Gates still has over the world’s stability.
Please play this song for a moment.
…
…
…
Thanks
Except, he doesn’t. At least not in the case of the CrowdStrike outage for as far as I can be sure. One nice thing about a conspiracy being spread in my field of expertise is that I can at least say I understand the subject matter closely enough to know why the conspiracy is rubbish. If the multitude of root cause analyses available aren’t enough to convince you, there probably isn’t a way to convince you short of any conspiracy touting media outlet you do trust retracting their story and correcting the record.
…And since I haven’t seen any pigs soaring through the sky today, I hope you enjoy this selection of stable geniuses.
The Conspiracists
Warning that there is some colourful language used below, left in its entirety for historical accuracy. There were some threats of violence that were omitted.
I know using Facebook is cheating, but sometimes you have to stare into the abyss to see what stares back. Other popular haunting grounds of Bill Gates-related conspiracies are Twitter and Reddit that are never short of exciting ways to tie Bill to some predicted catastrophe.
Conclusion
Thankfully the Internet is by majority in agreement that what happened with CrowdStrike wasn’t a psyop conducted by an evil billionaire. However, outside of IT outages, there’s still a hugely alarming amount of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and calls to violence against perceived threats to the World as they know it.
Misinformation is even easier to purport with the advent and availability of LLMs (Large Language Models, i.e. AI) that can really make bystanders and fence-sitters believe something is more widely accepted than it is.
In a future post, I’ll be exploring the “Dead Internet Theory” and whether or not there’s any truth or ‘loss of ground’ to the claim that the Internet is now mainly made up of bots and machine-generated content.