A social media post went viral on Friday amid the worldwide Microsoft outage that virtually stopped all critical infrastructure, including banking and aviation. A man named Vincent Flibustier claimed to be the cause of the pandemonium and identified himself to X (previously known as Twitter) as an employee of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company at the center of the outage. Flibustier claimed to have been sacked after the outage in a different article made hours later.
On microblogging platform X, Flibustier shared a post titled “First day at CrowdStrike, gave a little update and took the afternoon off.” The post was accompanied by a selfie of him outside the CrowdStrike office, which was reportedly edited.
First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off ✌️ pic.twitter.com/bOs4qAKwu0
— Vincent Flibustier 👽 (@vinceflibustier) July 19, 2024
The post went viral, garnering over 408K likes, 39.7M views, and 2.8K comments.
A few hours later, the post was followed by another tweet, which said, “Fired. Totally unfair.”
Flibustier also appealed to X boss and billionaire Elon Musk for a job.
“Hi @elonmusk Do you have a job for me? Please RT so M. Elon Musk can see this,” he posted on X.
Flibustier also shared a confession video on X, and said he is waiting for his termination letter.
He explained in the video, “It was my first day on the job as a new system admin, and I was very eager and excited. Let’s say I actually made a small update to one line of code, optimized an update a little bit and maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I got fired, so I was called.”
He further added, “They called me back today, told me that I really need to come back. It wasn’t even really to congratulate me. I thought it was like that. Now, I’m just waiting for my termination document. He told me you should never put an update into production without testing it, especially not on a Friday, and I said, ‘Well, it’s not Friday; it was Thursday, and today is Friday.'”
Who is Vincent Flibustier?
Vincent Flibustier is not a former CrowdStrike employee, but he has never worked for CrowdStrike. His post on X was a prank. After the prank, he also changed his bio on X to read, “Former CrowdStrike employee, fired for improper reason, changed only 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as a system administrator.”
According to France.TV, Flibustier is a satire writer who runs the parody news portal Nordpresse.