The recent massive IT outage affecting approximately 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide, including financial institutions, airports, and emergency services, was linked to a faulty update from the third-party security firm CrowdStrike. This critical failure, which resulted in the notorious "blue screen of death," was attributed by Microsoft to a 2009 agreement with the European Union. This deal mandated Microsoft to provide third-party security vendors with the same level of access to their systems as Microsoft itself, which inadvertently allowed for such critical bugs to emerge​​​​.CrowdStrike's CEO, George Kurtz, clarified that the downtime was not due to a cyberattack but a bug in their update, which has since been identified and resolved. This incident has sparked discussions about the vulnerabilities in centralised systems, with proponents of decentralised architectures, like Bitcoin's Jameson Lopp, highlighting how distributed systems can mitigate such risks by avoiding single points of failure​​​​.