# Crash 8.5 million computers with this one weird trick: A CrowdStrike story Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/technology-pill-560921/crash-8-5-million-computers-with-this-one-weird-trick-a-crowdstrike-story Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/technology-pill-560921/crash-8-5-million-computers-with-this-one-weird-trick-a-crowdstrike-story.md Podcast: [Technology Pill](https://stenobird.com/podcast/technology-pill-560921) Published: 2025-03-14T14:54:55+00:00 Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/technology-pill/episodes/Crash-8-5-million-computers-with-this-one-weird-trick-A-CrowdStrike-story-e305mmm Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/152674c8/podcast/play/99850390/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-2-14%2F396569143-44100-2-d8ed47b871bd5.m4a Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/technology-pill-560921/episodes/crash-8-5-million-computers-with-this-one-weird-trick-a-crowdstrike-story Duration seconds: 2066 ## Resource This week we're discussing the 2024 incident in which a malformed update of CrowdStrike Falcon caused 8.5 million computers running Microsoft Windows to crash. Links - Read our in-depth article about what happened and what it tells us about the security and robustness of the modern internet - Find more about the 911 outages across several US states - CrowdStrike's own review of the problem - Our podcast on the XZ exploit - Facebook VPN exploitation - The philosopher Caitlin was thinking of was Paul Virilio ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/technology-pill-560921/episodes/crash-8-5-million-computers-with-this-one-weird-trick-a-crowdstrike-story/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/technology-pill-560921/crash-8-5-million-computers-with-this-one-weird-trick-a-crowdstrike-story.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.