In this blog article, Justin Macklin, one of the consultants who work with us as part of NCF Consult plots out what providers need to be aware of following the CrowdStrike outage. Friday 19 th July saw what Elon Musk described on X (Twitter) as the "biggest IT fail ever". Microsoft estimates a faulty CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million PCs word-wide 1. The impact of the incident was large, with both individual PCs and many online services affected. There is so much information published about the incident, it is difficult to identify the main issues for the care and support sector. Questions include: Who are CrowdStrike and what happened? CrowdStrike are a company which sells security software that is designed to keep systems safe from external attacks such as viruses and other malware. One of their products, Falcon Sensor, was sent a software update that was faulty and crashed the Windows machines it was installed on.