It's early morning on July 19th, in London.

Inside a hospital room, a nurse preps an elderly man for heart procedure.

Before they begin, she wants to take

one last look at his medical history, so she grabs the Microsoft Surface tablet off the mobile

cart near his bed. But when she taps on the tablet's screen, it turns solid blue and shows an error

message. It looks like the dreaded blue screen of death,

but she's never seen it on one of the hospital's tablets before. The nurse exhales,

frustrated, and heads to the reception desk to see if she can find a functioning tablet.

But when she reaches the hallway, she stops short. It's total chaos. A dozen nurses are hurrying back and forth,

many of them carrying their own malfunctioning tablets. The nurse walks up to the reception desk to ask

for help. Hey, could you pull up a patient's records for me? My tablet's just gone in haywire.

Everybody's been asking me the same thing,

but my computer has the same blue screen as yours. Did you call IT? I've been on hold with them for 10

minutes. I think the whole network is down, and I just heard from a friend at another hospital.

They're having the same exact problem. Oh no. Do you think

it's a cyber attack? I hope not. They're already talking about postponing this morning surgeries

until they can figure out what's going on. I'm worried for some of the patients. They can't afford to

wait. What the nurse doesn't know yet is that this isn't a cyber attack.

It's something else entirely.

And a company called CrowdStrike is the source.

CrowdStrike makes the cyber security software that protects this hospital's Microsoft-based

systems.

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