From the Sphere to false cyberattack claims, misinformation runs rampant amid CrowdStrike outage

Amanda Silberling
·2 min read

It seemed too good to be true. On Friday morning, as the East Coast woke up to one of the most widespread IT disruptions ever due to a faulty CrowdStrike update, a priceless image circulated across X, accumulating millions of views. It appeared that the Sphere — the ostentatious new addition to the Las Vegas skyline, with 580,000 square feet of programmable LEDs on its exterior — had succumbed to the blue screen of death.

But according to a representative for the Sphere, this photo was digitally altered. The Sphere escaped unscathed from the CrowdStrike outage, which has affected computers running Windows across the global economy.

https://twitter.com/aaronoleary/status/1814233715964358919

It would be easy to believe this photo was real; after all, we're seeing images of the blue screen of death in airports and hospitals around the world. But there are some tell-tale signs that this vaporwave dream isn't a reality. For one, this same image of the Sphere is the only "evidence" we have that the Sphere was affected, yet publications like the Daily Mail and the Express Tribune reported the altered image as fact.

Meanwhile, on the Sphere's YouTube livestream, people can clearly see that the Sphere is functioning, as much as they might have wished that the hilarious idea of a "BSOD sphere" was real.

A possible Sphere outage, while funny in theory, is pretty low stakes. But it serves as an example for how easy it is to spread inaccurate information online during a time of immense global confusion and panic.

In a more dire vector of misinformation, terms like "cyberattack" have trended on X, while searches for "cyberattack" spiked on Google. But according to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, this is not a security incident or cyberattack. Instead, the popular cybersecurity firm pushed a faulty update, which caused an outage among Windows hosts. But the nature of that defect also means that some consumers are blaming Microsoft for the issue. It doesn't help either that Elon Musk, who has 190 million followers on X, is reposting memes that imply that Microsoft is the culprit.

Before the CrowdStrike update, Microsoft did experience a Microsoft 365 service disruption overnight. But the current CrowdStrike outages are unrelated to last night's issue, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.