The reason behind Microsoft outage
Before jumping into the reason, it is important to understand – what caused the outage. The trigger point was the CrowdStrike’s update. If you are unaware, CrowdStrike is a global IT security solution provider that offers a host of security solutions including endpoint security, threat intelligence and cyber attack response.
The issue was in the Falcon sensor configuration update to Windows systems. “This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems”, the company mentioned in the official statement. You can read our Microsoft’s massive outage explained in 10 points article here.
A vast majority of companies and businesses rely on CrowdStrike for security solutions for their PC data security and data safety and also protect them from cyber threats.
Here are three reasons why your personal PCs remained functional during outage.
CrowdStrike is an enterprise-only security solution
The biggest reason behind the outage not affecting home PCs is that CrowdStrike is an enterprise security solutions provider. Most Personal Windows device users either rely on Microsoft’s own Defender tool or some third-party antivirus program to keep their data safe.
As we’ve mentioned, systems that got affected by the outage are only those who rely on the Falcon Sensor security solution.
Microsoft 365 for personal users was not impacted
During the outage, Azure and Microsoft 365 were also affected. However, this was on business and enterprise levels only. This means all the personal services like Office, Word, Excel or even a cloud solution like OneDrive, were operational during the outage.
