Tech

Vincent Filibustier, the fake strike worker who claimed credit for the biggest IT outage ever

July 20, 2024
Ayhan

Vincent’s flip poster image went viral within minutes and has already garnered nearly 400,000 likes.

New Delhi:

“What is CrowdStrike? Why is my Windows PC getting a Blue Screen of Death? Who is responsible for the biggest IT outage ever?”

These are the questions that have dominated conversations around the world after a Microsoft bug caused Windows computers to crash. While it is now known that an update to CrowdStrike’s FalconSensor antivirus software was responsible for the massive outage around the world, people are still wondering how such a flawed update was allowed to be released and who was behind it.

Enter Vincent Flipposter, an X user posing as a Crowdstrike employee. Vincent broke the internet with an AI-generated altered image of himself outside the CrowdStrike office with the caption, “First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a small update and took the afternoon off.”

The photo went viral within minutes and has already garnered nearly 400,000 likes and been shared by over 36,000 users.

Two hours later, Flipster posted another update — the company announced he had been fired. He also posted a short video in which he took “responsibility” for causing the worldwide outage.

Vincent Filibustier also changed his bio on X (formerly Twitter) to match the parody. His bio reads: “Former Crowdstrike employee, unfairly fired, changed just one line of code to improve performance. Looking for a job as a system administrator.”

While he was trying to joke about it, thousands of people online bought into his sarcasm and believed he was responsible for the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on their systems. Airlines, banks, TV channels and many other industries were quick to deal with the issue, and people on social media were quick to search for the “culprit.”

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While many users praised him for making sure they didn’t have to work on Friday, some posted abusive messages about him.

Fact: Vincent is a satirist who runs the Belgian satirical news site Nordpress. He has appeared as a guest on France TV, where he said: “People are drawn to stories that confirm their preconceptions.”

Explaining why people online were so immediately drawn to his joke, he said: “No culprit has been named yet. It’s just served on a silver platter. People love having a culprit. The culprit looks like a complete idiot, is proud of his idiotism, and takes the afternoon off on his first day at work. This is part of a huge hype where people are desperate for new information. The fake thing is inherently new, you won’t read it anywhere else.”

He also said the tweet was shared by those who knew it was a joke, but the amplification sent it into a zone where people took every word of the tweet literally.

Millions of users around the world are still experiencing issues, and both Microsoft and CrowdStrike are trying to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

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The latest version of Falcon Sensor was supposed to make CrowdStrike customers’ systems more secure against hacks by updating the threats it defends against. However, a bug in the code in the update files led to one of the most widespread outages in recent years for companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The problems surfaced quickly after the update was rolled out on Friday, with users posting photos on social media of computers with blue screens displaying error messages. These are known in the industry as “blue screens of death.”

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