CrowdStrike deja vu as 'performance issue' leaves systems sluggish

Some IT administrators suffered a moment of deja vu on Thursday morning as CrowdStrike blamed a cloud service issue for performance problems and lagging boot times affecting some of European customers.

"CrowdStrike hits again," noted one admin on Reddit, along with: "At least it's not on a Friday."

While it likely needs no explanation, the customer is referring to that fatal Friday in July when a faulty file update inadvertently led to what may well be the largest IT outage in history.

Another admin reports their organization "had performance issues being reported all day," including "delays and slowness when running things."

Luckily for the embattled security vendor and its customers, however, there was no blue screen of death this time around, nor does it appear that this remediation will ruin any admins' weekend plans. CrowdStrike says it has now fixed the problem, and there's nothing to worry about.

The security biz posted its original alert at 0850 UTC on Thursday:

A status update from 1220 UTC said performance was returning to normal, and a spokesperson told The Register that it had fixed the issue.

"CrowdStrike identified and resolved a cloud performance issue this morning that had caused system delays for a small segment of EU cloud customers," a company spokesperson said. "This is not related to the Channel File 291 incident, and all customers have remained protected throughout." 

The spokesperson declined to say how many customers were affected by the issue: "A nominal number of customers were affected."

The Channel File 291 incident, of course, refers to the flawed Falcon endpoint defense software update that boot-looped millions of Windows computers worldwide last month.

CrowdStrike is now facing legal threats from Delta Air Lines, which claims the IT meltdown cost it more than $500 million, as well as a class-action lawsuit from investors for making false and misleading statements about its software.

Earlier this month at DEF CON, CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas accepted the Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail and admitted, "we got this horribly wrong." ®