Tech
Texas judge throws out second lawsuit over CrowdStrike outage | Computer Weekly
CrowdStrike has been granted a motion to dismiss a consumer class action lawsuit brought by shareholders who were affected by the now-infamous 19 July 2024 outage – prompted by a faulty sensor update – which crashed Windows PCs around the world causing widespread disruption and billions of pounds worth of losses.
The suit, filed on behalf of CrowdStrike investors in August 2024, accused the defendants, who included the company’s founder and CEO George Kurtz of making false and misleading statements over the efficacy of the Falcon platform at the centre of the outage.
It also alleged failings over software testing and quality assurance and claimed that CrowdStrike was seeking to maximise its profit by rushing untested updates.
Handing down his decision at the federal district court for the Western District of Texas in the city of Austin, US district judge Robert Pitman said the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in their entirety in part because the shareholders had failed to establish any plausible motive of intent to commit securities fraud on CrowdStrike’s part.
It his judgment, Pitman said the court agreed with CrowdStrike that the statements it made were neither false or misleading when considered in the context from which the plaintiffs removed them. He wrote that the court concluded that if anybody was being misleading, it was the plaintiffs.
Rejecting other arguments, Pitman also said that corporate mismanagement did not, standing alone, give rise to a multibillion-dollar claim
“We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful consideration and decision to dismiss this case,” said CrowdStrike chief legal officer Cathleen Anderson in a brief statement.
The Reuters news agency earlier reported that the office of New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who led the lawsuit, is reviewing options following the decision.
Multiple actions
Last June, Pitman also dismissed another lawsuit brought by airline passengers who experienced delays and cancellations after the sudden blackout.
Pitman’s decision in this case was made on the basis that the US Airline Deregulation Act preempted the claims the plaintiffs were making against CrowdStrike. His ruling has effectively shielded CrowdStrike from consumer suits related to disruptions experienced by its customers.
However, a third lawsuit brought by US airline Delta is still working its way through the US legal system.
Delta was particularly badly affected by failures arising from the outage and was highly critical of CrowdStrike in the wake of the incident after it was forced to cancel thousands of flights and spend millions compensating stranded passengers and putting them up in airport hotels.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft have both claimed that Delta in fact rejected their offers of help during and after the disruption.
Single point of failure
The 2024 CrowdStrike outage stands as a stark reminder of the potential for a global catastrophe arising from unscheduled technical outages given the interconnected nature of cloud platforms, which enable single points of failure to cascade rapidly.
The scale of the problem was aptly demonstrated in November 2025, when web traffic management firm Cloudflare was hit by its worst outage in six years.
In an incident that bears some similarities to the CrowdStrike outage, Cloudflare had made a minor and seemingly innocuous change to a feature configuration file used by its Bot Management security system, which caused the file to grow larger than expected and propagate across the Cloudflare network, causing crashes and disrupting daily life on the world wide web for millions.
A month earlier, AWS customers experienced a 15-hour outage after the cloud giant experienced a series of cascading technical issues at a northern Virginia datacentre powering its US-East-1 region, and in June, Google Cloud went on the blink for many after an incorrect change to an application programming interface (API) management system triggered a crash loop.
Speaking to Computer Weekly’s sister title Search Cloud Computing today, Forrester principal analyst Lee Sustar said that such incidents are a “preview of what’s to come” and predicted more similar stories to come in 2026.
Sustar said that a combination of hyperscalers pivoting from legacy environments to GPU-centric datacentres to manage AI workloads, and ageing infrastructure, would likely lead to “major multiday outages” in the near future.
Today, Apple announced its new budget MacBook. At $599, it looks seriously impressive. While I haven’t tested its performance, battery life, or display just yet, it may end up being hard to beat at that price based on some of the specs alone.
But that doesn’t mean the competition isn’t there. I want to recommend a couple of Windows laptops deals that offer various advantages over the MacBook Neo, showing where the Neo has both strengths and weaknesses.
First, check out this Asus Vivobook 14, a laptop I’ve been happy to recommend as a budget computer for the past year. In many ways, this is the Windows version of a laptop like the MacBook Neo. It uses a highly-efficient ARM chip, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X, meaning it gets great battery life and performs admirably in daily tasks. It’s not quite as thin or light as the MacBook Neo, but it’s fairly portable for a laptop at this price.
Unlike the MacBook Neo, the Vivobook 14 comes with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. That’s twice what you get in the MacBook Neo’s starting configuration. Right now, this configuration of the Vivobook 14 is on sale for $539. That’s a killer deal for those specs. It even comes with a healthier mix of ports, including HDMI, two USB-A, one USB-C, and a headphone jack. That also means it can support two external displays unlike the MacBook Neo, which can only handle just one.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not at all saying the Vivobook 14 is a slam dunk over the MacBook Neo. Based on specs alone, I know the Vivobook 14 is a serious step down when it comes to the display. It’s less sharp, stretched across a larger screen, and the color performance isn’t so good. The Vivobook 14 maxes out at 280 nits, whereas Apple says the MacBook Neo can go all the way up to 500 nits. I have a hunch that the MacBook Neo will deliver a much better display in just about every regard.
There’s also the touchpad. It’s a little clunky to use, which is typical of budget Windows laptops. This is just a guess—but the touchpad on the MacBook Neo will likely feel smoother. It’s a mechanical trackpad (unlike the MacBook Air’s haptic feedback trackpad), but Apple has almost never made a bad trackpad.
If you’re not convinced by the Asus Vivobook 14, I’d also recommend the HP OmniBook 5, which is currently on sale for $500 and uses the same Snapdragon X chip. While it only has 256 GB of storage, it has a much better screen than the Vivobook 14, using an OLED display. It’s not any brighter than the Vivobook 14, but it gives you far better color performance and contrast. It’s also just 0.50 inches thick, matching the MacBook Neo exactly in portability.
Other Good USB Hubs to Consider
Ugreen Revodok Pro 211 Docking Station for $64: Most laptop docking stations are bulky gadgets that often require a power source, but this one from Ugreen straddles the line between dock and hub. It has a small, braided cable running to a relatively large aluminum block. It’s a bit hefty but still compact, and it packs a lot of extra power. It has three USB ports (one USB-C and two USB-A) that each reached up to 900 MB/s of data-transfer speeds in my testing. That was enough to move large amounts of 4K video footage in minutes. The only problem is that using dual monitors on a Mac is limited to only mirroring.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Hyper HyperDrive Next Dual 4K Video Dock for $150: This one also straddles the line between dock and USB hub. Many mobile docks lack proper Mac support, only allowing for mirroring instead of full extension. The HyperDrive Next Dual 4K fixes that problem, though, making it a great option for MacBooks (though it won’t magically give an old MacBook Air dual-monitor support). Unfortunately, you’ll be paying handsomely for that capability, as this one is more expensive than the other options. The other problem is that although this dock has two HDMI ports that can support 4K, though only one will be at 60 Hz and the other will be stuck at 30 Hz. So, if you plan to use it with multiple displays, you’ll need to drop the resolution 1440p or 1080p on one of them. I also tested this Targus model, which is made by the same company, which gets you two 4K displays at 60 Hz but not on Mac.
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Anker USB-C Hub 5-in-1 for $20: This Anker USB hub is the one I carry in my camera bag everywhere. It plugs into the USB-C port on your laptop and provides every connection you’d need to offload photos or videos from camera gear. In our testing, the USB 3.0 ports reached transfer speeds over 400 MB/s, which isn’t quite as fast as some USB hubs on this list, but it’s solid for a sub-$50 device. Similarly, the SD card reader reached speeds of 80 MB/s for reading and writing, which isn’t the fastest SD cards can get, but adequate for moving files back and forth.—Eric Ravenscraft
Kensington Triple Video Mobile Dock for $83: Another mobile dock meant to provide additional external support, this one from Kensington can technically power up to three 1080p displays at 60 Hz using the two HDMI ports and one DisplayPort. It’s a lot of ports in a relatively small package, though the basic plastic case isn’t exactly inspiring.
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Global oil and gas prices have skyrocketed following the US attack on Iran last weekend. But another key global supply chain is also at risk, one that may directly impact American farmers who have already been squeezed for months by tariff wars. The conflict in the Middle East is choking global supplies of fertilizer right before the crucial spring planting season.
“This literally could not be happening at a worse time,” says Josh Linville, the vice president of fertilizer at financial services company StoneX.
The global fertilizer market focuses on three main macronutrients: phosphates, nitrogen, and potash. All of them are produced in different ways, with different countries leading in exports. Farmers consider a variety of factors, including crop type and soil conditions, when deciding which of these types of fertilizer to apply to their fields.
Potash and phosphates are both mined from different kinds of natural deposits; nitrogen fertilizers, by contrast, are produced with natural gas. QatarLNG, a subsidiary of Qatar Energy, a state-run oil and gas company, said on Monday that it would halt production following drone strikes on some of its facilities. This effectively took nearly a fifth of the world’s natural gas supply offline, causing gas prices in Europe to spike.
That shutdown puts supplies of urea, a popular type of nitrogen fertilizer, particularly at risk. On Tuesday, Qatar Energy said that it would also stop production of downstream products, including urea. Qatar was the second-largest exporter of urea in 2024. (Iran was the third-largest; it’s also a key exporter of ammonia, another type of nitrogen fertilizer.) Prices on urea sold in the US out of New Orleans, a key commodity port, were up nearly 15 percent on Monday compared to prices last week, according to data provided by Linville to WIRED. The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is also preventing other countries in the region from exporting nitrogen products.
“When we look at ammonia, we’re looking at almost 30 percent of global production being either involved or at risk in this conflict,” says Veronica Nigh, a senior economist at the Fertilizer Institute, a US-based industry advocacy organization. “It gets worse when we think about urea. Urea is almost 50 percent.”
Other types of fertilizer are also at risk. Saudi Arabia, Nigh says, supplies about 40 percent of all US phosphate imports; taking them out of the equation for more than a few days could create “a really challenging situation” for the US. Other countries in the region, including Jordan, Egypt, and Israel, also play a big role in these markets.
“We are already hearing reports that some of those Persian Gulf manufacturers are shutting down production, because they’re saying, ‘I have a finite amount of storage for my supply,’” Linville says. “‘Once I reach the top of it, I can’t do anything else. So I’m going to shut down my production in order to make sure I don’t go over above that.’”
Conflict in the strait has intensified in the early part of this week, as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have reportedly threatened any ship passing through the strait. Traffic has slowed to a crawl. The Trump administration announced initiatives on Tuesday meant to protect oil tankers traveling through the strait, including providing a naval escort. Even if those initiatives succeed—which the shipping industry has expressed doubt about—much of the initial energy will probably go toward shepherding oil and gas assets out of the region.
“Fertilizer is not going to be the most valuable thing that’s gonna transit the strait,” says Nigh.
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