A risky trade-off made CrowdStrike’s outage so devastating – cybersecurity leaders say there’s no easy fix

The flaw essentially caused computers running Microsoft Windows to freeze up and display the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’. Affected systems needed to be brought back to life, one by one. — Getty Images/The New York Times

When Michael Armer’s phone started blowing up at 4am Friday morning, he “freaked out”.

Armer, the chief information security officer at RingCentral, was receiving notifications about a stunning computer outage that was knocking down airport, bank, and hospital tech systems like dominos.