CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, looked visibly nervous and choked on his words, while explaining what went wrong, and how a single update caused so much disruption around the world.

On July 19, a poorly designed software update from CrowdStrike crashed countless Microsoft Windows computers, causing disruptions to banking, stock markets, air travel, and other services.

How did it happen?

CrowdStrike updated ‘Falcon,’ a cloud-based software product, which is the company’s flagship cybersecurity platform, caused the worldwide outage.

The Falcon software, which interfaces with other components of computer systems and software, such as Microsoft’s Windows products, was updated by CrowdStrike. This led to a malfunction that virtually rendered those systems and their extensively used software globally inoperable.

Simply put, the software meant to keep critical computer systems safe from disruptions and crashes ended up bringing them down.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” Kurtz later wrote on X, earlier Twitter.