2024 CrowdStrike incident

On 19 July 2024, the American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor security software that caused widespread problems with Microsoft Windows computers running the software. As a result, roughly 8.5 million systems crashed and were unable to properly restart in what has been called the largest outage in the history of information technology and "historic in scale".

The outage disrupted daily life, businesses, and governments around the world. Many industries were affected—airlines, airports, banks, hotels, hospitals, manufacturing, stock markets, broadcasting, gas stations, retail stores, and governmental services, such as emergency services and websites. The worldwide financial damage has been estimated to be tens of billions.