Crowdstrike is not owned or in any way in a business relationship with Microsoft, offers the software that caused the issue for Mac and Linux as well, and in fact caused similar issues on specific Linux Distros a few months before this recent cock up.

The issue only effected Windows OS machines that were running the Crowdstrike Falcon endpoint protection software, which runs at ring 0, kernel level. This presents the same potential for causing boot loops in all OSes due to the nature of running software that deep into the guts of things. The only caveat is that some Linux Distros have separation preventing things from running at that low level, and apparently so does Mac OS.

The update was not pushed out through Microsoft, as many are incorrectly repeating. It was a malware definitions update which was downloaded automatically by the Falcon software itself, without any configuration options available for admins to stage and do partial rollouts for testing.

Also, I significantly doubt that any company is going to do a complete overhaul of its IT architecture to switch over to a new OS for end user devices, when the simplest solution is to just switch to a different endpoint protection software. I’ve worked half a decade in an enterprise architecture type position, that simply isn’t how things work in this world.