CrowdStrike’s Use Across Government Spread Prior to Outage

The Defense Department tops a list of 16 agencies reporting a total of nearly $55 million in unclassified purchases of CrowdStrike cyber protection software — cited as the cause of the largest global computer outage following a failed update last week.

Agency spending for CrowdStrike products rose 70% in fiscal 2023 to $15.7 million, from $9.3 million in fiscal 2022, led by the departments of Defense ($5 million), Treasury ($3.9 million), and Justice ($2.9 million).

A faulty update tied to CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform hit servers and networks running Microsoft Windows systems. The update triggered widespread computer shutdowns across the government ...