Windows/CrowdStrike Outage: The Most Important Lesson

On July 19, users of about 8.5 million Windows users worldwide faced the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death.” As I write this column, many remain down. Microsoft has issued a manual fix for machines that aren’t able to automatically recover, but it’s a black eye for Microsoft and for Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm whose fault software update caused the outages.

While 8.5 million may not seem like a lot of machines in the scheme of things (about a billion and a half PCs run Windows 10/11, not counting older versions of the operating system), it wasn’t the number so much as the user identity that mattered.

The victims weren’t, for the most part, kids playing Minecraft. They were corporate customers — airlines, banks, hospitals, hotels. Flights were canceled. Account holders couldn’t access their bank accounts online. Surgeries were postponed.
My knee-jerk reaction, I confess was: Well, yeah …NEVER trust Windows or Crowdstrike (I’m a long-time Linux user and consider Crowdstrike’s close relationship with, and willingness to manufacture cybersecurity scams for, the Democratic Party suspect).

But I quickly realized that WAS just a knee-jerk response. The real lesson is: Widespread and exclusive reliance on single systems is a bad idea.

This outage didn’t affect MacOS, it didn’t affect Linux (and variants such as ChromeOS), and it didn’t affect cybersecurity software other than Crowdstrike’s product.

It did, however, affect the CUSTOMERS of businesses using the Windows/CrowdStrike combo on centralized systems.

For example, four US airlines had to cancel flights.

Why were they all using the same OS/security software combo?

And why didn’t they have backup systems, running different OSes and different security software, that could be quickly brought online to work from the same data sets as the usual systems if something like this happened?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen lots of loud calls for government to impose various top-down, one-size-fits-all “cybersecurity” solutions.

This outage demonstrates the problem with that idea.  Various government operations, including 911 call centers, fell victim to the problem. Requiring private sector entities to use government-approved “solutions” would expose even more users to problems hitting those “solutions.”

In the future, we can expect more, not fewer, collapses of computer systems and networks. Putting all our eggs in one operating system / cybersecurity basket is just asking for worse and more widespread disruption.

Unfortunately, as an individual user, you remain continually vulnerable to mistakes and poor decisions made upstream from your home PC desktop.

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