When a global CrowdStrike outage knocked Windows PCs offline, people asked why Macs weren’t affected. We dug into the details to find out the answers.
Over the last few days, tech news has been dominated by one thing: the CrowdStrike outage. On July 19, businesses around the world were affected by a major computer failure, as banks, airports, hospitals and more saw their vital systems go offline, leaving customers stranded without help.
The root cause was quickly pinpointed to a faulty update to the CrowdStrike antivirus software. Affected computers had been running this app and were unable to boot after the update was installed, leading to chaos around the world.
But there was one curious wrinkle in this story: only Windows computers seemed to be affected, with CrowdStrike’s CEO explicitly saying that macOS and Linux systems were safe. Why was that the case, and what does it say about the resilience — or vulnerability — of Windows versus other operating systems?A faulty update
Since the problem was caused by a faulty antivirus update, you might be tempted to think that this is what shielded Macs from the fallout. After all, Windows has a much worse reputation than macOS when it comes to viruses, with many people believing that Apple’s computers simply don’t need antivirus apps, either because they’re better protected against malware already or because hackers don’t bother attacking Macs.
But that doesn’t properly explain the CrowdStrike situation. I spoke to Joshua Long, chief security analyst at Mac antivirus firm Intego, who noted that “the incident was caused by a faulty CrowdStrike content update, a configuration file that CrowdStrike pushed out to Windows endpoints. This file triggered a logic error in CrowdStrike’s Windows software, which caused impacted PCs to crash with a blue screen of death.”
That suggests that the problem wasn’t actually inherent to Windows, and its absence from macOS was not down to the superior security of that system.
