July 19th saw 'Frantic Friday' take an unexpected turn when what is typically the busiest day of the year for summer holiday travel instead became dominated by the CrowdStrike IT outage, with 8.5 million Windows devices being affected worldwide, disrupting transport plans and leaving some international airports having to resort to whiteboards for flight updates. The cause of all the chaos was itself an update, pushed out by CrowdStrike to Microsoft end users globally. As Microsoft said in a blog update on the outage, "It's a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritise operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist."

Commenting on the outage, Ranjan Singh, Chief Product Offier of Kaseya said "While solution vendors certainly do their best when pushing out updates, widely deployed and trusted software solutions still run the risk of defective code, as in this case, or other bad code which may cause havoc. For critical system updates, many IT teams adopt a phased approach to rollout or testing updates in a sandbox environment. In this case, CrowdStrike automatically updated to provide a fast response to new and emerging threats. The catastrophe illustrates the challenge of widely deployed software without IT controls, and the critical needs for a rock-solid backup and recovery plan to ensure resiliency against cyberattack, unintentional buggy code, and just about anything else."

For Douglas Wadkins, VP of product management & technology at Opengear, the outage underlines the risk of failing to identify a single point of failure. "Identifying and mitigating single points of failure within an IT system is crucial for the level of continuity planning that could have kept systems up and running. Today it was an operating system issue; tomorrow it could be a network failure. When a software misconfiguration such as this happens, secure remote network access plays a vital role in swiftly addressing the issue and remediating it before the network goes down. The financial impact this will have cannot be overstated. Ensuring network resilience across the entire IT stack is imperative to safeguard against such widespread disruptions in the future." The outage will continue to make headlines this month, at least on devices that aren't still showing a blue screen of death.

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