How US Cloud Led Clients Through the CrowdStrike Outage
When Everything Blue-Screened, We Showed Up First
Case Study Overview
On July 19, 2024, a botched CrowdStrike update triggered widespread system crashes across global IT infrastructure—including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and countless enterprise environments. As millions of endpoints began boot looping, hundreds of US Cloud clients flooded support channels with severity 1 tickets.
US Cloud’s Critical Incident Response Team mobilized within hours, delivering fixes up to two days faster than Microsoft and helping clients restore operations amid chaos.
Case Stats
Organization: Every Client Using CrowdStrike (100+)
Industry: Nearly Every Industry
Technology: Azure, Hyper-V, Windows 10, Windows 11, Server
Severity Level: 1
What Happened: A Broken Driver Took Down Endpoints Around the World
CrowdStrike, a widely used endpoint protection platform, released a faulty update to its Falcon sensor around 11 PM CT. The update included a driver (C0000000291*.sys) that made an out-of-bounds memory read, causing all affected systems to blue screen on boot. Because the Falcon driver loads before the OS kernel, systems never made it far enough to recover or roll back—creating an endless crash-reboot loop.
By midnight, US Cloud began receiving a wave of high-severity tickets from clients experiencing outages across Windows 10, 11, Server, and virtualized environments (Hyper-V, VMware). Azure and Google Cloud were also impacted due to CrowdStrike’s presence in backend systems, compounding the disruption.
The impacts of the CrowdStrike outage were far-reaching and long-lasting. For example, a year later, Delta Airlines proceeded to sue CrowdStrike for $500 million in losses resulting from the July 2024 snafu. Even though connected systems are now up and running again post-outage, the consequences of the incident and its corresponding downtime are still being sorted out for many customers.
In another example, sources are discovering that the CrowdStrike outage disrupted medical care in hundreds of hospitals across the United States. The minimum estimate for impacted hospitals is 759 institutions, with 200+ hospitals experiencing outages directly related to patient care.
While this statistic does not in any way indicate that the outage was directly responsible for any medical emergency or healthcare failure, it does speak to the dire importance of maintaining IT uptime. In other words, the reality is that downtime for any organization’s IT infrastructure can cause a ripple effect of harm to those served by the organization.
US Cloud’s Response: Rapid Response, Tailored Solutions
Rather than wait for Microsoft or CrowdStrike to respond, US Cloud independently reverse-engineered the problem and developed multiple recovery strategies:
- Root Cause Identification: By 8:30 AM, our engineers had diagnosed the issue with the corrupt driver.
- Multi-Path Resolution Plans: We provided three distinct solutions tailored to client needs:
- Safe Mode access and manual file deletion.
- System rollback instructions.
- Repeated reboot strategy (post-patch fix recognition).
- Virtual Environment Recovery: For clients using Azure or VMware, we walked them through attaching virtual disks to secondary machines, deleting the faulty file, and reattaching for clean boot.
- Portal + Email Communication: Clients were notified early not to update CrowdStrike, preventing further damage.
- Scalable Documentation: We delivered ready-to-execute scripts and ISO build steps for use across large, diverse environments—critical for clients with thousands of endpoints.
Our clients didn’t just get fast help—they got accurate help before most even knew what broke.
Issue Resolution Timeline: From Panic to Playbook
- ~12:00 AM CT: Initial outages begin; clients report blue screens.
- 2:00 AM – 5:00 AM CT: CrowdStrike patches the issue on their end, but no unified workaround is yet available.
- 8:15 AM CT: US Cloud activates a war room as day shift comes online.
- 8:30 AM CT: Our engineers identify the faulty driver and its impact.
- 9:00 AM CT: Safe Mode deletion scripts, VM boot instructions, and rollback options are published to clients via portal and email.
- 9:30 AM CT: ISO creation guidance is developed for recovery.
- 1:00 PM CT: Complete recovery playbooks are live for clients—two days ahead of Microsoft’s official response.
US Cloud: Expert Support When It Matters Most
US Cloud’s proactive response to the CrowdStrike outage exemplifies our value as a third-party Microsoft support provider. With over 50 critical tickets resolved before noon and guidance delivered days before Microsoft, our clients experienced faster recovery, fewer internal delays, and less stress during a massive global disruption.
While we couldn’t prevent the outage, we minimized its cost—likely saving clients millions in downtime-related losses. For organizations evaluating support partners, this case is proof that US Cloud delivers real results, not just promises.
