Microsoft outage: ‘Former Crowdstrike employee’ says his 'little update’ caused global disruption, satire or real?

The global Microsoft outage on Friday caused many employees to hilariously celebrate the “Blue Screen of Death” Day with disrupted IT operations across services. With banks, airlines, media outlets and other institutions facing the worst end of the unprecedented worldwide IT lockdown, cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike later assured users that we weren’t under a malicious cyberattack. The widespread outages around the globe were believed to be linked to a software update gone wrong.

Hours later, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz released a statement, saying they had discovered the “defect.” “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz wrote on X/Twitter. “The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed,” he added, signalling how a corrupted content update for Windows caused the breakdown.

Trolls claim responsibility for Microsoft outage

Once the confirmation rolled out, several internet users saw the opportunity to meme the situation. Jumping on social media, people appeared to be satirically claiming responsibility for the CrowdStrike update.

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Among them, a man named Vincent Flibustier also jumped on the bandwagon. Claiming to be a former employee of the cybersecurity company, he alleged on X that he had “pushed” the “little update” that ultimately resulted in Microsoft operations crashing worldwide.

Along with a supposedly edited selfie of himself at CrowdStrike, he also released a now-viral video message, seemingly stitching up a story about how he messed things up on his “very first day on the job as a new system admin.”

Flibustier captioned his duck-faced selfie: “First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off ”

In a follow-up tweet, he added how “totally unfair” it was that he had been fired. The thread continued with a video embed, in which he seemed to explain what had happened. “I’m waiting for my letter of dismissal,” he wrote.

“Hello, it was indeed definitely absolutely me who did the CrowdStrike modification that caused all this worldwide. It was my very first day on the job as a new system admin and I was very eager and excited. Let's say I actually made a small update to a line of code, optimised an update slightly a little bit and maybe I shouldn't have. I got fired so I was called in. Normally, I only work in the morning, but I worked in the morning, made a small update, and then went home. Then, they called me back today, telling me that I really need to come back. It really wasn't even to congratulate me. I thought it was as if it was so. Now, I'm just waiting for my termination documentation. They told me that you should never put an update into production without testing, especially not on a Friday, and I said, 'Well, it's not Friday; it was Thursday, and today is Friday.' But, you see, I had tested the update on my PC, and it was working,” he said in his video message.

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Flibustier also tagged Elon Musk in a subsequent tweet, asking if the Tesla boss had a job for him. Although he continued pushing the narrative, several netizens pointed out that a fellow X user, @nixcraft, had painted the same satirical story about pushing a “major code to production” on his first day at the cybersecurity firm. Keeping with his act, Flibustier also changed his X bio accordingly, which now reads, "Former Crowdstrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin."

Fact-Checking Vincent Flibustier's story

Back to Flibustier’s case: Despite many users being sceptical about his claims, some still believed in the purported line of events. However, a deep dive into French news reports soon slammed his efforts to the ground, revealing him as the controversial founder of NordPresse (https://nordpresse.be/). This parody site has existed since 2016 and has been accused of peddling confusion online. Beyond the fact-check protocol, even his “CrowdStrike photo” presents inconsistencies, which, when looked at closely, appears to have been manipulated with certain things half-present in the picture and his head weirdly edited into the snap.

French news site “liberation.fr” was one of the outlets to fact-check his profile in 2023 for disseminating fake news. France TV did the same in 2021. All the way back in 2018, MrMondialisation.Org even published an exclusive interview with the Nordpresse boss.

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