The Highwire with Del Bigtree - DECODING THE CROWDSTRIKE OUTAGE

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

In the aftermath of the largest global cyber incident in history, the corporate media is strangely silent on the details that matter. How could this impossible event happen? Was this a test run? Why is the public being aggressively prepped for a cyber attack? “The HighWire” investigatesBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

In the midst of an attempted assassination of a former president and obviously the leading Republican candidate for president. And then the current president dropping out, switching out people right before this election, we had the world's biggest cyber outage. And if anybody was in a cabin or something without internet service, this is what it looked like. All right. A massive global tech outage impacting what's estimated to be millions of people. A day of worldwide IT chaos, thanks to an update meant to protect systems. The widespread global impact of a single software glitch has given many a cause for concern.

It's an issue with a software update. It's impacting lots and lots of Microsoft computer systems worldwide. This is impacting all different types of businesses. Banks, hospitals, government offices, media outlets and other businesses all around the world. To emergency services, 911, traffic lights, transit systems, and it's having a major impact on air lines. impact on airlines as well. American Delta United, they're all keeping their flights grounded.

This appears to be an issue between CrowdStrike and Microsoft. You may not have heard of CrowdStrike before, but it has nearly 24,000 business customers around the world, many of them huge organizations. They were pushing out a pretty simple Windows update, mostly aimed at trying to stop malicious actors from targeting certain infrastructure that they found online. And it just went wrong. It caused this dreaded blue screen of deaths. It's weird because CrowdStrike is a very respectable company.

And when they do these type of updates, they test. And they test and they test in all different environments. So someone really dropped the ball. Someone truly made a mistake because this should not have happened. I've heard it describe as the most spectacular IT failure ever. It feels like the reasoning for everything we're watching the world is somebody dropped the ball. It was an accident, you know, there should have been, you know, better stopgaps in place. As there were to expect that some of the largest chaotic moments in the history of mankind, all of them are accidental, all happening at the same time.

Everyone watching needs to turn on their discernment, turn on their intelligence, and question everything, especially when it's coincidence. We're at that point in history right now. We're not talking conspiracy theory. We're talking about valid questioning of timing. So you saw those headlines. You heard there in the report. There's this word blue screen of death. So I mean, when I see that, that's something that's going to stick in people's head for a long time. That's a media narrative right there. So World brought to a halt. You can see this in headline form by drastic Microsoft outage with computer showing blue screen of death. And so we're being kind of taught to, at least from the media standpoint, we're being taught to believe that one little thing, just one little hiccup. the whole world can go down. So that's how fragile everything is. So if it happens again, you need to just understand, this is the world we're living in one little thing. When in reality,

you heard the person in that clip there saying, I don't know how this happens. There's stopgap measures baked into every level here. This should have never happened. I heard someone, a computer programmer, say this is like a Chernobyl event, like just one in a million chance. It should have never happened. So we see here what's going on, what is this? Is it still going on? I know Delta was still dealing with some of their flights over this last week. Some cancellations, I know Monday and Tuesday into the thousands. So we look at Reuters and it gives us an idea what we're looking at with CrowdStrike. And it's a company, they provide this malware software to protect.

And it says, CrowdStrike update that caused global outage, likely skipped checks. Whoops, experts say, but it says in here, over half of Fortune 500 companies and many government bodies such as the top US cybersecurity agency itself, the cybersecurity and infrastructure, security agency, use the company's software. Well, if you're looking for a one-stop shop to really affect the world on a global scale, this looks like a pretty good place to start. So this was pushed out by one single automated software update, an AI update, and it affected all Microsoft Windows systems.

It affected over 8 billion individual devices. Initial reports were saying, I'm hearing costs over $5 billion. There's a congressional hearing coming. This was, in order to reset these computers, I'm hearing it needs a manual intervention to delete the bad files on every computer. So, you know, it's pretty shocking that it's still not trailing and it's still not affecting the world more than it is right now. I guess that's a good thing for the response time. But this type of malware files that CrowdStrike has, it goes into the computer's operating system. So this is the base level of these eight billion devices. So that's

That's why they can't even start up. You get that blue screen. You can't even, the computer is completely worthless. And when I see this, I start to think, again, timing, coincidence, especially right now in this historical time. In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, the pandemic is raging. People are losing their lives. We have mandates, lockdowns, masking.

The World Economic Forum comes out and says this, check out this headline, prepping for a cyber pandemic, worldwide drill underway. The World Economic Forum kicked off its. annual cyber polygon exercise Friday, which gives companies and governments the opportunity to participate in a simulation of a cyber pandemic. So just pouring on this fear from WEF. Well, I mean, look, I also, I mean, I just want to say one of the things that bothers me the most about this story is how quickly the problem was solved. I mean, I find it really hard to imagine that something you didn't see coming that wiped out created a blue screen of death

in companies across the world, tens of thousands of thousands of. thousands of them could be remedied and nothing to see here a day later. We're all just fine. That just defies reason. Now, I'm not a computer specialist in any way, but I will say based on that point. And based on, let me just take it from the perspective of a journalist. I am so tired of journalists just taking whatever narrative they're handed. Call the company.

What does CrowdStrike say? It was an accident. We were just doing a computer. We're just doing an upgrade. And somehow that triggered this problem all across. Okay, thank you. We'll go ahead and report that. How about the fact that was there some sort of blackmail that went on here? Was there some diabolical entity that says you think you're in control of your systems in the United States government, your defense systems?

We're going to shut you down for a day and show you. How do we know that that didn't happen? Was there a threat attached to this? Was this simply a test by the U.S. government to see how the entire world will respond? Where are those questions by journalists? Start asking the questions, would you please, instead of whatever they told me, that's what I'm going to say. I mean, this is a shocking story. And the fact that we're just being given this really simple explanation, oh, was a mistake, everybody go back to sleep.

I'm so tired of fact that everyone's afraid to ask the most obvious question. Was this potentially on purpose in any way? Who would be gaining something? Where are all the places that someone that did this on purpose? Would they gain advantage in the world or power in overgovernments? These are the types of questions should be asked. Our media has become absolutely useless to citizens in this country and around the world. And that's why we're questioning, we're looking at people like the WF saying,

we're going to run these drills. I mean, we saw what happened the last time drills were run right before the coronavirus. You got to question these things. So on World Economic Forum's own website in 2023, they ran this headline. which is kind of accurate, geopolitical instability raises threat of catastrophic cyber attack in next two years. Well, boy, did they get that one right on target. Not what we're saying this is a, we're being told to cyber outage with crowd strike. We're talking cyber attack here, but where's the line drawn?

And that's the question I'm asking. So here's another report. These are all within the last year or two. UK could be brought to a halt at any moment by cyber attack report warns. Even in 2022, Biden releases Russian cyber attack. warning to all Americans. So in America here, we're seeing a framing of that if the cyber outage happens, cyber attack happens, we may want to look towards Russia, which is really dangerous. And that's not just the first time we saw that headline from President Biden or that type of talking point.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton was challenging Donald Trump for the presidential election, she said something really interesting. This was the headline that came out of that. Clinton treat cyber attacks like any other attack. And people kind of thought, this is kind of coming out of nowhere. She says, as president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. The Democratic presidential nominee said, we will be ready with serious political, economic, and military responses, military responses. So after she did not, obviously, win that presidential election, she was doing a talk in Stanford, and she said this. Take a listen. Right. I believe it is time for the United States to

declare a new doctrine stating that a cyber attack on our vital infrastructure will be treated as an act of war and met with a proportional response. If you watch the crowd in that video after she says that the camera pans over the crowd, people's jaws are hanging open. She's saying an act of war, a military response, I mean, are we talking nuclear? What are we talking about here? And that was the posture that she wanted coming into the White House if she would have been elected, why is everyone focusing on this cyber attack so intently? And where's the line drawn between cyber audience and cyber attack? And this checks a lot of boxes. So we heard that when COVID happened. It really checks a lot of boxes for control, for people that are in power that want

to stay in power. A cyber attack does the same thing now. So let's just go break this down really quickly. We have Australia. Here's a headline. Australia to be functionally cashless by 2025. Well, we know that when this cyber outage happened across the world, anybody that was cashless like Australia, here's a cold supermarket in Australia. And you can see here, they had literally a handwritten piece of paper saying cash only, EFT down globally. So sorry. So you're shutting, you're completely shutting down the financial system at that point. We know here in the United States, e-trade, places like that that were trading for the stock. market, those avenues into the stock market were shut down. Those were paused. So this would be a

great cover for what we're being told is a global financial reset. A lot of our guests talk about this, Catherine Ross and Fitz and other people, also these central bank digital currencies, this switchover. That would be one. And then we talk about this, you know, the election coming up. So even before this cyber outage happened, we saw this out of mainstream news, voting experts warn of serious threats for 2024 from election equipment software breaches. Well, that's exactly what happened in Arizona. For this cyber outage, just a couple of weeks ago, global computer outage snarls Arizona's early voting raises alarm about November. So just to recap, a cyber outage, however it's framed, checks a lot of boxes. It provides cover for a financial reset,

possibly, provides an excuse to go to war with Russia if we're going to use that combination. And at the very least, it could provide disruption for the 2024 election. So this is something I really think people are going to have to keep on the front burner and watch. This was the biggest cyber outage. If anybody was living in 1999, this was the outage that we are told to expect when the year 2000 happened, global cyber outage. So it's interesting this happens now, and it kind of just gets brushed off the media. I mean, obviously we have a pretty stacked news cycle these days, but this is a very important topic. And I don't think it was the last of this topic we're going to hear from, unfortunately. That's what is so disturbing. As I sit here,

I've had a couple more thoughts just watching your incredible breakdown of this story. The fact that it wasn't a big story should be shocking to everybody. In fact, here is the question, you know, as I'm sitting here thinking about, well, you have this cyber attack, nobody seems to want to talk about it. Why are we asking any of the right questions? Was it like I've said before? Was it done on purpose? Was there anything to gain?

You know, was it a test? Was it something that could affect our electoral systems? But here is the point. Here's the biggest question of all. When you want to call bologna beans, let's look at the media. Let's look how dramatic it is. It says things like deadly snowstorm. I mean, we now live in a time where it can't just snow,

where we're not talking about someone that died because their heater didn't work in their house, or somehow they decided to light a propane tank in their house and got asphyxiated therefore the snow killed them. Media goes out of its way to exaggerate the dangers of a story, except this one. Except this one. Let me riddle me this, Batman. Are we to believe that computer systems across the world just shut down, some of which run airplanes and God knows what else and not a single person in the world died because of it?

somehow some glitch didn't either cause an accident or something to fall or anything to happen or or a medical machine to stop working. Nobody could find a single death to exaggerate to this story to the level that we see every other story. When the news stops acting like itself, when it breaks outside of its norm, you should be asking serious questions. When a story this big is suddenly, it's just a basic story. Everyone did just find moving on. No way, no how. Something stinks here, and it stinks really bad,

and all of the media is in on it in some way. That's how I got to see it, because you're not acting like yourselves. You're a bunch of crazy people that make everything seem as big as you could possibly make it except this story. Why? And there's going to be congressional hearings on this actual event. So that hopefully will shed some light.

We have people I know you're going to speak to Ron Johnson, We have people that are very, very knowledgeable about these things that can come in there and really point to where, you know, where to look for this congressional hearing. So I hope that happens. Yeah. Well, I'm Jeffrey. You are a busy man. This is, I mean, it is incredible the amount of stories that we're having to handle here. And just, you know, it's just a blur.

It's all happening so fast. It's getting scary to go to bed to imagine what am I going to wake up to tomorrow. I'm so glad we have you on our team. Thank you for bringing the truth where you can find it and getting into details. I'm really just not seeing reported the same way anywhere else. You're amazing. It's great to have you on the team.

Thank you. All right. Thank you very much.