Are Macs affected by the Crowdstrike outage?

The CrowdStrike global IT outage has wreaked havoc on critical infrastructure running on Windows-based computing platforms throughout Friday, but what about Mac users?

The issue, which has grounded flights, halted trains, paralysed banking systems, and humbled healthcare manifests as the fabled blue screen of death on Windows PCs. It’ll inform them “It looks like Windows didn’n’t load properly” and recovery attempts aren’t solving the issues.

The hugely disruptive issue, Crowdstrike says, is due to “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” that has now been identified. Oops.

However, all this might have been avoided if the same infrastructure was running on Mac and Linux machines rather than Windows. In a statement, Crowdstrike confirmed the issue, which now has a fix being deployed, won’t affect macOS users.

In a statement, the company wrote: “Crowdstrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.

“We further recommend organisations ensure they’re communicating with Crowdstrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of Crowdstrike customers.”

Unfortunately for striken Windows users it’s not just a case of resetting the PC and moving on. There’s a process required to identify the bad file and delete it. Unfortunately for IT admins, the weekend is probably a little farther away.

Have you been affected by the Crowdstrike fail today? Let us know how @trustedreviews on Twitter/X.