💡 The Microsoft / Crowdstrike outage

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👉 The what and the why

On July 19, 2024, a global cyber outage caused by a defect in CrowdStrike's "Falcon Sensor" software led to widespread disruptions across multiple industries.

This software glitch caused Microsoft Windows systems to crash, resulting in the infamous "Blue Screen of Death." The issue was not a result of a security breach but a technical problem stemming from a software update.

CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, counts over 20,000 subscription customers, including more than half of Fortune 500 companies, amplifying the impact of the outage.

The extent of the incident

Major airlines such as American, Delta, and United grounded flights, while airports in Spain, the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India faced operational challenges.

The outage also affected broadcasters like Sky News, healthcare booking systems in the UK, and financial services globally, from Australia to Germany.

Microsoft and CrowdStrike worked to deploy a fix, but the manual nature of the resolution process meant that full restoration of services would take several days.

👉 The implications for you

The outage disrupted business processes across various sectors, highlighting the critical importance of robust cybersecurity measures, but also how vulnerable our infrastructure is when many rely on one source for protection.

• Out of work: Chances are that if you were affected by these events, it was mostly resolved. However, the result is still there; if you’re a business owner, it’s likely you lost out on important work or missed deadlines.

• Safety: With the events affecting even healthcare services, it can be seen as an important reminder that perhaps we should be more self-reliant. Services go, and what then?

Overall, the main implications of this blackout have already been resolved for the most part. So, instead of focusing on what it did to some of us, let’s focus on what to do going forward.

🔥 Our take on it

Our societal digital infrastructures are very fragile. Friday proved that.

Services from banking, healthcare, public transport, emergency services, international travel, and hundreds of others all have one thing in common – they’re run digitally.

While that’s usually great and offers speed, reliability, and ease of use, it also poses a massive problem. What happens if the digital platform we rely on goes dark?

Should we go analog?

The problem isn’t necessarily the fact that we’re all digital today, but rather its fragility. If one server blacks out, most of our everyday services go out.

That probably doesn’t mean businesses should swap out server racks for bookshelves, but rather that we should consider how reliant we are on the tools we use.

What we’re getting at here is that having millions of devices rely on one software like Crowdstrike is likely a terrible idea. No matter how safe, secure, and reliable a software is, there is always a risk of human error and malicious third-party attacks.

So, from now on, will we see any changes? Not sure. What do you think?

👋 See you on Thursday!

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