What To Know About The CrowdStrike Outage
CrowdStrike: An International Inconvenience
On July 19th, there was an international CrowdStrike outage which affected many major institutions such as hospitals, airlines, digital media, finance, and government organizations in many countries. According to CNBC, this was the ‘largest IT outage in history’ due to its widespread financial losses, damage, and negative effects. CrowdStrike, an important EDR provider for Microsoft, launched a faulty update for its Falcon Sensor, used for the Windows operating system. The update was deemed fit for launch due to a hidden bug in the program content validator, creating a huge problem for millions of people and important industries. Because of the organization’s lack of ensured testing, millions of Windows devices displayed what is known as the “Blue Screen of Death”; a blue screen indicating a complete outage in the Microsoft system. The infamous blue screen left many enterprises with little resources to function and their machines powered by Windows were out of use, causing disorder, panic, and a lack of security. Furthermore, the outage caught all staff and authority by surprise making responsibilities more difficult to uphold.
Why is this important?
The effects of the CrowdStrike outage left countless damages for each of its leading users. Technical specialists were required to manually remove the update over the course of several days, resulting in flight delays, loss of intel, poor communication, and a newfound unreliability in their cybersecurity. This was a major inconvenience for the critical industries that depend on CrowdStrike services for their success. In one case, a total of $500 million was lost at Delta Airlines after having to cancel around 2,000 flights. There were also around $5 billion in financial losses for other major enterprises. All around, the international outage left much damage to each of CrowdStrike’s main dependents.
Thankfully, CrowdStrike itself made sure to issue an apology informing the public of its commitment to improving the testing processes so this never happens again. Further testing on all future updates and programs would include techniques such as stress testing, fuzzing, rollback testing, as well as fault injection to ensure the best results.
Ways to avoid the outage:
According to TechRepublic, “SentinelOne Singularity and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are among the top CrowdStrike alternatives”. Neither of these EDR providers affected their users like CrowdStrike did on July 19th because of their alternative work ethic and testing procedures. It’s safe to say that many industries and businesses could be wary of depending on CrowdStrike for future EDR needs. However, there are still other viable options that will provide more efficient services to all major enterprises and businesses, big or small.
At EV-Consultech, we help clients stay informed about cybersecurity threats to their business success. We understand how valuable and important reliable service is to every company which is why we have ensured it with SentinelOne for over 2 years. Contact us today and learn more about the importance of cybersecurity knowledge.
