The good news, is that this was not a hack.
CrowdStrike, a company that provides what's called "endpoint security", with a 20% share of the worldwide market, pushed a faulty software update.
As the name implies, endpoint security, means that the software agent, sits on your device (laptop, phone, etc). It's invisible, and was installed on your system, by your corporate IT department.
The endpoint, communicates with the master servers, that manage the installation of the agents on the clients (your laptop, etc).
Due to the snowball effect, it will take a few hours (give or take) for the client on your own system to update with a fix to the problem.
This is only on Windows.