New Apple ad makes fun of CrowdStrike bug

It’s been more than a year since the CrowdStrike bug paralyzed Windows computers all over the world. Apple’s marketing department has not forgotten the incident – and is now using it for advertising purposes for the company’s business products. As part of the “The Underdogs” campaign, which consists of ten-minute episodes at the production level of US comedy series, the new episode is about the blue screen of death associated with the CrowdStrike error. “BSOD” is the episode accordingly titled.

CrowdStrike at the trade fair, Mac mini helps

As always, the series revolves around a small start-up from the packaging industry that has freed itself from a corporate world in previous episodes. This time, the group wants to exhibit their product at a trade fair in order to win the buyer of an organic food store group as a customer. Of course, this doesn’t work at first and a competitor (with PC hardware and software, of course) sets up the secondary stand. Finally, the CrowdStrike error occurs throughout the trade fair with corresponding chaos, the PCs fail and the “The Underdogs” team can continue to use their Macs.

The security expert in the team – connected in style via FaceTime – is then allowed to explain that Macs are not affected by the problem because the system isolates its endpoint security routines from the kernel. However, this has not been entirely problem-free recently – network changes in macOS 15 alias Sequoia caused outages in exactly such programs in September 2024. Apple finally solved the problem a few weeks later.

Trouble over episode from Thailand

There is also a happy ending to “BSOD”: The start-up heroes (and later the trade fair management) distribute Mac mini M4 machines, with which the competition, which had previously been abandoned by Windows, can then resume its work. The sought-after buyer is happy about so much softness (and naivety) of the start-up and becomes a customer, ordering two million of the bags that the company produces.

By the way, “The Underdogs” was not entirely uncontroversial. Apple withdrew one episode shortly after its release because there had been protests over the clichéd portrayal of Thailand. In addition to various negative social media postings by individuals, politicians from the country also complained. Sattra Sripan, Speaker of the Tourism Committee of the Thai House of Representatives, said something like, the people in Thailand are “very unhappy” with the advertising. He even called on the population to “stop using Apple products and switch to other brands”.