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CrowdStrike Outage Causes Auto Industry Disruption

While the CrowdStrike outages disrupted dealerships, public transit, rental agencies and many manufacturers, the same issue had an effect on many automotive service and repair shops. In most cases, the disruption was short lived.

There were no disruptions to most government payments and reporting systems that experienced disconnections. Government officials have been in close contact with key agency leadership and regulators now examining the incident.

Steven Schillinger

Samah Shaiq, deputy press secretary at the Department of Energy, said, “DOE is working with CrowdStrike, Microsoft, federal, state, local agencies, and critical infrastructure partners to fully assess and address system outages.”

The outages were due to a faulty update from CrowdStrike for its Falcon product, the company said in a statement. Falcon is a piece of endpoint detection and response (EDR) software, which can detect signs of compromise on the machine. Because of its highly privileged position on a system, though, if something goes wrong it can be especially disruptive.

Windows users who have Falcon installed are facing Blue Screens of Death (BSoD). The fix involves booting the machine into safe mode and deleting a specific CrowdStrike related file called “C-00000291*.sys.” For many automotive sales, service and repair shops this will require IT teams to perform the fix physically on the computer itself rather than remotely.

Many agencies across the government, including the State Department, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Air Force, the Navy, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), and many more may have been affected.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency in coordination with federal, state, local, and private sector partners, is working to assess the impact of the CrowdStrike outage on patient care and HHS systems, services, and operations.”

The Department of Commerce said that “The Department provided communications regarding CrowdStrike and Microsoft to all employees and is monitoring the impact from the incident. This remains an ongoing situation and we are closely coordinating with our Federal and industry partners.”

In a statement, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company is “deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption” caused.

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