Acronis Blog – 8/1/24
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.” — Edward A. Murphy Jr., American aerospace engineer
The CrowdStrike outage of July 19, 2024 has already been covered in a thousand news stories and a hundred memes. The short version: Cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike issued a minor but flawed configuration update to its EDR product that caused 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems to crash. Rebooting from the “blue screen of death” caused by the bug merely resulted in another blue screen. The outage crippled airlines, hospitals, banks, TV broadcasters and other businesses around the world, affecting millions of travelers, patients and consumers, not to mention the tens of thousands of IT pros who had to spend their weekend manually applying a fix to each affected computer to revive it.
Source: Murphy’s Law and the lessons of the CrowdStrike outage