Fact Check: Is Former CrowdStrike Employee Vincent Flibustier Behind the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ Microsoft Outage?
The ‘Blue Screen of Death’ Day disrupted IT operations across many sectors, including banks, airlines, media outlets, and other institutions.
The global Microsoft outage on Friday was caused by an update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, who later assured users that it was not a security breach and there was no malicious cyber attack.
However, it did not prevent many from hilariously celebrating one of the worst IT outages in recent history, which even included Tesla chief Elon Musk, who posted several memes on his X account.
Among them was a man named Vincent Flibustier, who claimed to be a former employee of the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and claimed that he had pushed a small update which led to Microsoft operations crashing worldwide.
Did Former CrowdStrike Employee Vincent Flibustier Cause the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ Microsoft Outage?
He also created a selfie of himself at CrowdStrike and cooked up a story which he released in the form of a viral video claiming that he went bust on the first day of his job as the new system admin.
Flibustier captioned his duck-faced selfie:
‘First day at CrowdStrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off.’
He followed it up with a tweet where he stated that he had been fired and it was not at all fair.
This was followed by another video in which he explained the whole episode.
‘Iām waiting for my letter of dismissal,’ he wrote.
‘Let’s say I actually made a small update to a line of code, optimized an update slightly a little bit and maybe I shouldn’t have. I got fired so I was called in.’
Continuing his bluster, Flibustier also tagged Elon Musk in a subsequent tweet and asked if the Tesla chief has a job for him.
Flibustier also changed his X bio accordingly, which now reads:
‘Former CrowdStrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin.’
Fact-Checking
Vincent Flibustier’s story had many skeptics, but there were also a sizable number of X users who believed his story.
However, a background check by verifythis.com, a popular fact-checking website, revealed that Vincent Flibustier was the controversial founder of NordPresse (https://nordpresse.be/).
The site has been in existence since 2016 and has often been indicted in the past for peddling confusion online.
A closer look at his ‘CrowdStrike photo’ also revealed that it was manipulated and his head strangely edited in the picture.
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