Thousands fall for fake Crowdstrike worker's joke that he was responsible for biggest Microsoft outage

The Microsoft error that crippled Windows computers became a major topic of discussion worldwide.

Although it's now known that an update to CrowdStrike's 'Falcon Sensor' antivirus program caused the massive outage, there are still questions about how such a defective update was released and who was responsible for it.

Vincent caused a stir online by posting an AI-generated photo of himself outside the CrowdStrike office with the caption, "First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off."

The photo went viral within minutes, garnering nearly 410,000 likes and being shared by over 36,000 users.

Two hours later, Flibustier posted another update claiming that the company had fired him. He also shared a short video in which he humorously took 'responsibility' for causing the global outage.

Vincent Flibustier also changed his X (former Twitter) bio to accompany the parody. His bio said, "Former Crowdstrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin."

Airlines, banks, TV channels, and various other industries were frantically trying to address the issue, while social media users went into a frenzy upon discovering the 'culprit'.

Some praised him for making sure they didn't have to work on a Friday, while others posted abusive messages about him.

Earlier, Vincent appeared as a guest on France TV, where he commented, "People are drawn to stories that confirm their preconceptions."

Explaining further why people on the internet immediately latched on to his joke, he said, "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. 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 also mentioned that the post was initially shared by those who understood it was a joke, but as it spread, more people began to take every word of the post literally.

The latest version of CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software was intended to enhance clients' systems' security against hacking by updating the threats it protects against.

However, faulty code in the update files caused one of the most widespread tech outages in recent years for companies using Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Problems emerged quickly after the update was rolled out on Friday, with users posting pictures on social media of computers showing blue screens with error messages, commonly known as "blue screens of death.”