CrowdStrike confirms Macs are 'not impacted' by a global outage impacting airlines, banks, and more — and a fix is on the way

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Where are all those Xserves at?

Windows 11 on Mac with Parallels
(Image credit: Andrew Williams)

If you're waiting for an airplane or wondering why you can't log into your online banking, there's a good chance that CrowdStrike is to blame. The cybersecurity company pushed an update out early this morning that has caused untold problems the world over, but there's good news — your Mac is just fine.

Banks, airlines, airports, retailers, and a whole host of companies in numerous industries have reported a variety of issues over the last few hours as servers and services go offline thanks to a faulty CrowdStrike update that has caused Windows PCs to fail to restart correctly.

But in a post on the X social network, CrowdStrike president and CEO George Kurtz delivered some good news. He says that "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted," although that won't help you too much if a service or app you rely on happens to hook into a Microsoft server that is affected.

Safe and secure?

In the post on X, Kurtz said that the issue is not a security incident or a cyberattack, which is of course good news for everyone. He went on to add that "the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed." It will not be up to service management and technical teams around the world to implement the fix on their impacted servers in order to fully restore services.

People have taken to the internet to report canceled and delayed flights while some retailers are currently unable to process contactless payments as a result of the outage.

Apple fans will of course point out that those running Apple's old Xserve servers are unaffected by this issue, although we have to imagine that the number of those still in use is infinitesimal compared to those powered by Windows. The Xserve was discontinued back in 2011, and it definitely won't run macOS Sequoia when it is released this fall.

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Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

24 Comments Comment from the forums
  • FFR
    Sucks to be a windows user
    Reply
  • EdwinG
    Sucks to be an ICT employee today. I feel for the Service Desk Technologists and Systems Administrators that will need to do some cleanup after this.

    CrowdStrike will need to do an RCA and ensure this doesn’t happen again.

    Even if it’s not Microsoft’s direct fault, I hope Microsoft prohibits kernel-level modules from being loaded in the future, but that’s going to take time if they do that - like 5-15 years easily.
    Reply
  • FFR
    I wonder how many Enterprises will be switching to the mac
    Reply
  • Just_Me_D
    FFR said:
    I wonder how many Enterprises will be switching to the mac
    Companies, in my opinion, have been switching to Macs for quite some time. Having said that, it’s going to take several more outages like this to get big companies to set the money aside to switch completely over.
    Reply
  • FFR
    Just_Me_D said:
    Companies, in my opinion, have been switching to Macs for quite some time. Having said that, it’s going to take several more outages like this to get big companies to set the money aside to switch completely over.

    True, but if you remember it took a massive blackberry outage to kill the brand in the enterprise.

    And this is a massive outage for Microsoft.
    Reply
  • Just_Me_D
    FFR said:
    True, but if you remember it took a massive blackberry outage to kill the brand in the enterprise.

    And this is a massive outage for Microsoft.
    From what I gather, Windows users who do not have their system set to auto-update are not affected — at least that’s what I’m being told.
    Reply
  • FFR
    Just_Me_D said:
    From what I gather, Windows users who do not have their system set to auto-update are not affected — at least that’s what I’m being told.

    Could be, but I have never seen this happen to Microsoft at this scale. Uk, Germany, France, Australia have all been affected.
    Reply
  • FFR
    EdwinG said:
    Sucks to be an ICT employee today. I feel for the Service Desk Technologists and Systems Administrators that will need to do some cleanup after this.

    CrowdStrike will need to do an RCA and ensure this doesn’t happen again.

    Even if it’s not Microsoft’s direct fault, I hope Microsoft prohibits kernel-level modules from being loaded in the future, but that’s going to take time if they do that - like 5-15 years easily.

    Didn’t Microsoft push out the update? That’s pretty much a direct fault.


    Just_Me_D said:
    From what I gather, Windows users who do not have their system set to auto-update are not affected — at least that’s what I’m being told.


    It’s being reported a billion users are affected globally out of 1.4 billion windows users. That’s a more than a significant outage.
    Reply
  • EdwinG
    Just_Me_D said:
    From what I gather, Windows users who do not have their system set to auto-update are not affected — at least that’s what I’m being told.
    It’s not a Windows update that caused it, but a content update for CrowdStrike’s EDR software. That software is also available for Macintosh and Linux systems, and it is usually installed for entreprises using CrowdStrike. Oh, and the updates, a user can’t disable them; only a security systems administrator can.

    The resulting impact would be identical should a defective update have been made available for those systems. A pure kernel panic on boot.

    Apple has improved their kernel module handling, but AFAIK it’s not 100% there yet. So, until the OS developers fully prohibit kernel-level modules, it’s going to occur again.

    https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-falcon-content-update-for-windows-hosts/
    Reply
  • EdwinG
    FFR said:
    Didn’t Microsoft push out the update? That’s pretty much a direct fault.
    As I posted, no they did not. It’s a different company altogether, CrowdStrike.

    If the system is not running CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor on a Windows operating system, it’s not going to have this specific issue.

    It can also affect macOS and Linux in the same manner, because guess what, CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor is also available for those two series of operating systems.
    Reply