On 19 July 2024, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor software, crashing roughly 8.5 million Windows computers in what is now considered the largest IT outage in history. The incident disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals, and government services globally, with financial damages estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The root cause was a defective configuration file (Channel File 291) that triggered an out-of-bounds memory read, sending affected machines into boot loops or recovery mode. Although CEO George Kurtz confirmed a fix was deployed within hours and that it was not a cyberattack, recovery dragged on because many systems required manual, on-site deletion of the faulty driver. The event exposed critical vulnerabilities in global digital infrastructure, as the enterprise-focused software left most personal PCs untouched but brought major corporate and governmental networks to a standstill.