On July 19, 2024, a significant global outage was triggered by a malfunction in a software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. This glitch primarily affected Microsoft Windows systems, leading to widespread disruptions across various sectors, including airlines, banks, hospitals, and emergency services. Many systems experienced the “blue screen of death,” rendering them inoperable. The incident highlighted the extensive dependency on technology and the potential impact of software failures on critical infrastructure. Airlines, hospitals, banks, and many other businesses came to a halt as their servers and computers stopped working.
As someone who dealt with ransomware in April 2023 (Read: Effective Steps to Handle a Ransomware Attack Quickly), one of the key measures we implemented was endpoint protection. Endpoint protection is the modern version of antivirus software designed to detect intrusions immediately, unlike traditional antivirus programs that only scan for viruses on a schedule. The top two endpoint protection solutions presented to us were CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. I was relieved to find out that we had chosen SentinelOne. I arrived at the office feeling confident and glad because we had superior endpoint protection, and there were no issues with our computers or servers.
My happiness quickly vanished when I walked into the office and learned that our ERP system was not working properly. One of our company’s decisions was to host the ERP on the cloud with our vendor, for which we pay hefty fees. We discovered that the ERP was hosted on Microsoft Azure, which uses CrowdStrike. This caused us to be down for the entire day.
Isn’t it ironic that the software meant to protect us from ransomware became the ransom? We were unable to work and had to rely on the vendor to fix the issue.
Although a fix was published within hours of the issue being reported, the cure was a long way off. Each server or computer had to be individually touched and fixed.
Taking a step back, one might start to wonder: Are these software companies too big? Are they bigger than any government? Does a programmer have more power than a government official? With a single line of code, they took down nearly half of the world.
Is there a way to prevent or avoid this in the future? Are we too dependent on certain software?
