Friday morning proved to be the biggest IT shutdown in decades and all thanks to a major software error from a company called CrowdStrike. The error was so big that airlines, healthcare, retail and even offices were affected.
This company was supposed to help us prevent major cyber attacks on systems but its own mistake has cost billions to the industry, let alone Microsoft, which claims around 8.5 billion devices running on its software were affected by the global tech outage.
Their flagship product, Falcon, acts like a vigilant guard inside your computer, constantly monitoring for suspicious activity. When it detects potential threats, it sends information to CrowdStrike’s cloud command centre for analysis and response,” explains Kumar Ritesh, Founder of Cyfirma which is a cybersecurity company.
The fact that Microsoft, which has a market value of over trillion dollars, relied on third-party vendors to push software updates puts the onus on the company to rejig its structure and set up a security force that can handle these tasks in-house. Having its own security mechanism is the reason why the CrowdStrike update mishap didn’t cause any disruption to Mac devices.
And since most businesses still rely on Windows machines for their operations, the cost of not looking at other avenues will cost them dear. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services, Microsoft was quick to note the reality of this event.
The CEO of CrowdStrike wanted to make it clear that the incident was not related to security or a cyberattack, but the reality of the situation makes the whole event more concerning for the firm, which is now likely to lose a lot of clients as they look to mitigate these errors from happening in the future.
The other big concern regarding this event is that even though CrowdStrike claims to have fixed the issue to get the systems up and running, the actual timeline to get everyone back online will take some time. “CrowdStrike has since fixed the issue on their end, but it might take some time for systems to return to normal for everyone else,” Ritesh highlighted.
IT events like these also show you the importance of investing in a robust IT infrastructure and having a skilled workforce to help the companies return to normalcy without losing too much downtime.
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