The CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage in 2024
| Case Code: ITSY142 Case Length: 11 Pages Period: 2024 Pub Date: 2024 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.400 Organization: CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Industry: Technology & Communications Countries: United States Themes: IT Infrastructure, Disruption |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
Abstract
The case discusses the global IT outage caused by American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. (CrowdStrike) in July 2024. The firm made an update to its antivirus software Falcon to protect its clients from malicious attacks. The update caused a logic error, resulting in the crash of several operating systems and cloud computing platforms of companies using CrowdStrike’s antivirus software. The tech failure caused absolute chaos with several airline companies having to cancel flights, hospitals having to cancel appointments and postpone their procedures, retailers not being able to take online payments, media and broadcasting services going off the air, and banking and financial services being severely hit.
The global IT outage underlined several challenges such as the vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure, which led to such failures. CrowdStrike was criticized for not having a robust testing and validation process for its software, which could have prevented the outage. Critics felt that organizations needed to be not only business resilient but also cyber resilient to tackle such outages in future.
What should George Kurtz (Kurtz), founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, and his team do to avoid such IT outages in future? Going forward, what should companies like Microsoft do to make their IT infrastructure resilient to IT outages so that businesses and industries can continue with their operations even during a crisis?
Issues
The case is structured to achieve the following teaching objectives:
- Identify the reasons for a global IT outage.
- Analyze how businesses can enhance IT resilience and ensure operational continuity in the event of a crisis.
- Formulate a strategic approach to prevent IT outages.
Contents
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Introduction
About Kurtz and Crowdstrike
The Outage
The Impact
Criticisms
Challenges
Looking Ahead
Exhibits
Keywords
Falcon; Cybersecurity; George Kurtz; Windows operating system; IT infrastructure; Endpoint Detection and Response; Rapid response content; Sensor content; Quality Assurance; Antivirus software; Blue Screen of Death; Robust testing; Validation process; Cyber resilience; Intelligent incident response system
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