Learning from the CrowdStrike Outage: Mitigate Risks & Prepare for Incidents

Let's go through what can be learned from a global tech outage, the incident caused by CrowdStrike Falcon Agent, how to avoid and what you can do to reduce the impact on your system.

Marcello Marrocos
DevOps, Cloud & IT Career

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This article explores the CrowdStrike incident, offering insights to minimize future disruptions and improve your preparation for the next big outage.

Photo by Matt C on Unsplash

The Incident

CrowdStrike released an update of its Falcon Agent, part of its solution platform to prevent security breaches.

This agent has privileged access to Microsoft Windows OS, hooking directly to the operating system's kernel (or core).

The flaw caused the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) on Windows worldwide, affecting at least 8.5 million devices.

Some initial reports attributed the issue to Microsoft Azure. Some then realized that personal devices and Windows-based servers hosted on-premises and in other cloud providers, such as AWS and Google Cloud, were also affected.

Fingers were pointed to Microsoft and there was not much they could do. After all, the issue was being caused by third-party software.

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Marcello Marrocos
DevOps, Cloud & IT Career

Cloud, Integrations and Collaboration Manager | in/mrmarrocos | DevOps, Cloud & IT Career Publication http://devopscloudit.com