What next for CrowdStrike after global IT tsunami?

A leading newspaper dubbed it ‘The Day the World Stood Still’ as flights, hospital surgeries, trains, banking, and more shuddered to a halt. Some 8.5 million computer systems malfunctioned when a corrupt CrowdStrike security update was automatically downloaded by many key IT infrastructures. As infinitely empowering as today’s technology is, this incident clearly highlights how vulnerable our connected world is.

Thankfully this ‘incident’ was fixed rapidly and wasn’t fuelled by malicious intent as we have seen with some cyber-attacks. However, the ripple effect on everyday operations caused by the disruption will continue for days to come. Some outlets are reporting that the outage could ultimately cost global economies up to $1 billion!

Is there anything businesses could have done to prevent these outages? In truth, not really. There might be some discussions around having redundancy computer systems for such a future scenario, but ultimately this was an automated update containing tiny errors.

While CrowdStrike is relatively unknown to the everyman, in the world of computers, it has become one of the leaders in protecting against security breaches. So good is its service that many critical elements of infrastructure employ the software to safeguard against outages – and that’s CrowdStrike’s big problem here. The software created to prevent an IT meltdown actually caused one.

While CrowdStrike acted quickly to provide a remedy, reputational damage has certainly been done. The onus is now on CrowdStrike to highlight its effectiveness in dealing with any ongoing issues while attempting to recover trust in its product. That last bit is key, because IT businesses live and die on how much they are trusted. Highlighting to the world that it forensically understands what caused the corrupted update and that a process is in place to ensure it never happens again will be essential. Attempting to deploy a ‘good news’ story via an effective PR strategy in the near future will also help shift perceptions.

Things go wrong, that’s life. In the world of Public Relations it’s all about how we deal with those challenges to get the ship pointing in the right direction once again.

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