‘People Like To Have A Culprit’: Man Tricks World Into Believing He’s The CrowdStrike Employee Who Caused Global Windows Outage

As people across the world tried to find a fix (and someone to blame) for their Windows computer freezing in front by throwing up a ‘Blue Screen of Death’ error message, Vincent Flibustier, who claimed to be a new hiring at CrowdStrike, released a video on social media taking all the blame.

Flibustier first shared a photo of himself inside what appeared to be a meeting room at CrowdStrike – an American cybersecurity technology company. The photo, released on X, contained the caption – “First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off”.

Meanwhile, as businesses and people struggled to find a fix to their errant Windows systems, news media outlets reported that an update to an antivirus program ‘Falcon Sensor’ by CrowdStrike caused the global outage. People struggled to understand how such an error occurred and who were the people behind it.

Meanwhile, Flibustier, amid this global commotion, changed his X bio to: “Former Crowdstrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin”.

He then went on to release an update where he claimed responsibility for the global outage.

Flibustier’s first photo has already gone viral and the view counter beneath the video shared on X was raking in thousands of views.

However, this was all a joke by Flibustier or a ‘satirical’ take on the global event.

Flibustier, a satirical writer who runs Nordpresse, a Belgian parody news site, had developed this plan to show that ‘people are drawn to stories that confirm their preconceptions’, as he explained later during an appearance on a news show at French broadcaster FranceTV.

He was also proved right. Many on social media and the Internet blamed Vincent Flibustier for the global outage. There were some who pointed out that there was something off with the photos shared by the satirical writer before he went viral but no one was paying heed to those developments as people looked to find a reason why such a global tech outage had occurred.

The sceptical, eagle-eyed observers found out that the first photo may have been made using AI-generated images. Flibustier’s headspace and (baby) hands appeared to be off on a second look suddenly for millions of people on social media after it was highlighted.

The photo has nearly 4 lakh likes and has been shared by over 36,000 users.

“No culprit named yet, I bring it on a platter, people like to have a culprit. The culprit seems completely stupid, he is proud of his stupidity, he takes his afternoon off on the first day of work,” he said while speaking to panellists at FranceTV.

He even had threat messages sent to him.

“This falls right into a huge buzz in which people absolutely need to have new information, and a fake is by nature new, you won’t read it anywhere else,” he further added.

A faulty software update caused technological havoc worldwide on Friday, grounding flights, knocking down some financial companies and news outlets, and disrupting hospitals, small businesses and government offices.

The trouble was sparked by an update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and only affected its customers running Microsoft Windows, the world’s most popular operating system for personal computers. It was not the result of hacking or a cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologised and rolled out fixes.

CrowdStrike’s CEO said some of their systems will require time-consuming manual fixes. Thousands of flights were cancelled and tens of thousands were delayed, leading to long lines at airports in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Media outlets, courts, motor vehicles departments, unemployment agencies, emergency call centres and other offices in the West were impacted.