Who’s behind Microsoft outage? Meet the ’fake’ Crowdstrike employee, Vincent Flibustier

Amid a global Microsoft outage on Friday that pushed key infrastructure, including airlines and banking, to a near-halt, a social media post has gone viral. A person named Vincent Flibustier introduced himself as a CrowdStrike—the cybersecurity firm at the centre of the outage—employee on X (formerly known as Twitter) and claimed responsibility for the chaos. Hours later, in another post, Flibustier said he was fired following the outage.

Taking to microblogging platform X, Flibustier shared a post titled "First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off✌️" The post accompanied his selfie outside the CrowdStrike office, which was reportedly doctored.

The post went viral, amassing over 398K likes, 39.7M views and 2.7K comments.

A couple of hours later, the post was followed with another tweet saying, “Fired. Totally unfair.”

Flibustier even appealed to X boss and billionaire Elon Musk for a job.

“Hello @elonmusk do you have a job for me? Please RT so M. Elon Musk can see it,” he posted on X.

Flibustier also shared a confession video on X, and said he is waiting for his dismissal letter.

“It was my very 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 a line of code, optimised an update slightly a little bit and maybe I shouldn't have. I got fired so I was called in,” he explains in the video.

“They called me back today, telling me that I really need to come back. It really wasn't even to congratulate me. I thought it was as if it was so. Now, I'm just waiting for my termination documentation. They told me that you should never put an update into production without testing, especially not on a Friday, and I said, 'Well, it's not Friday; it was Thursday, and today is Friday’,” he further said.

Who is Vincent Flibustier?

Vincent Flibustier is not a former employee of CrowdStrike, infect has never worked for CrowdStrike. His post on X was a prank. After the prank, he even changed his bio on X stating, “Former Crowdstrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin.”

“Specialized in Fake News and Social network,” he added.

According to France.TV, Flibustier is a satirical writer who runs a parody news portal Nordpresse.

In another post, he revealed the truth about his photo outside the Crowdstrike office—AI–generated—and explained the psychology behind his viral success. Flibustier even warned against taking things at face value on the internet and spreading misinformation, especially with the prevalence of generative AI. He even gave a seven-point list of what lessons we can learn from his fake post.