No, Bill Gates didn’t cause July 19 worldwide IT outage

Is Bill Gates to blame for the July 19 faulty software update that led to worldwide disruption of services? Viral social media posts claim so.

"Bill Gates woke up & thought to himself: ‘How can I screw the entire World over today’

And he did," a July 19 X post said.

Another X post sought to link the outage to both Gates and the July 13 attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump: "Was the Bill Gates sponsored IT outage supposed to coincide with their attempt to force the opposition into a civil war, or was it because it didn't succeed."

Airports, hospitals and news outlets were among those affected by the global outage. 

Featured Fact-check

Threads posts

stated on October 23, 2024 in a Threads post

Kamala Harris’ statements about Trump invoking Adolf Hitler were based on a “debunked hoax from The Atlantic.”

But just like the software update, these claims linking Gates to the information technology outage are faulty. 

CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company, claimed responsibility for the outage. 

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," the company said in a July 19 statement. "The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed." 

We found no evidence of a relationship between Gates and CrowdStrike. He is not listed among the company’s board of directors or executive leadership team. Although Gates co-founded Microsoft Corp. in 1975, he relinquished operational control of the company, stepping down as CEO in January 2000 and resigning from Microsoft’s board of directors in March 2020.

We rate the claim Bill Gates is responsible for the July 19 global tech outage False.