"Was it sabotage?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And somebody had better be digging into that question.
We don’t know it wasn’t.
And we don't know that it was. Who would benefit?
Sadly enough, the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" no longer applies to events we continue to see. While I consider sabotage in this case to be unlikely, it is not impossible. Perhaps some booby-trap that went off before it was planned to release?
But again, if you suspect conspiracy, who will benefit? That is where you must direct attention. If there was some kind of conspiracy, then you look for a technical person in a key position who just got a huge "inheritance" and retired. Or who just turned up dead "unexpectedly".
We don't have any such indicators yet.
The people who will lose are the ones at Crowd Strike. That company will be GONE. And the technical staff may be unemployable. The cyber-security industry is kind of a small community. Everybody has a reputation.
I’d argue that many benefit - from my understanding this mainly hit western nations. It could be an enemy State effort. It could be a competitor to Crowdstrike, this is a disaster for them.
Who knows? I ask, not for the reasons I can think of but for the reasons I can’t. This did $billions in damage and caused lots of chaos. Did somebody die because equipment wasn’t available? Quite possibly. It’s no different than asking ‘who would want to commit terrorism?’. It doesn’t have to make sense to you or I.
As a software expert, responsible for safety critical systems, including their cybersecurity, this is so amateurish I’m suspicious. That’s all.
Even if it was not sabotage, clearly we have a vulnerability. One that could be used as an attack vector in the future. There needs to be an investigation into exactly how this happened.
It raises a bigger question too. If the infrastructure is so dependent on Microsoft, how do we make this doesn’t happen again? Accident or not.
investopedia noted:
CrowdStrike (CRWD) short sellers made more than $373 million Friday after a defective update sent out by the cybersecurity company caused a global IT outage for Microsoft (MSFT) Windows hosts, according to research firm S3 Partners.
https://www.investopedia.com/crowdstrike-outage-microsoft-short-seller-stock-windows-8680960