Incident ResponseBusiness Continuity
On July 19, 2024, a routine software update to the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor caused widespread system outages affecting organizations around the world. While this incident was not an intentional cybersecurity attack, it underscored the vital importance of incident management, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning for modern organizations of all sizes.
CrowdStrike pushed a content configuration update to its Falcon endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform. The update contained a defect that caused Windows systems running the Falcon sensor to crash, resulting in the now-infamous "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) on affected machines. The impact was massive — airlines grounded flights, hospitals delayed procedures, financial institutions experienced outages, and businesses of all sizes found themselves unable to operate.
CrowdStrike quickly clarified that this was not a security event or cyberattack. It was a software quality issue — a flawed update that was pushed to production without adequate testing safeguards.
When you rely on a third-party vendor for critical security infrastructure, their failures become your failures. This doesn't mean you should avoid EDR solutions — they're essential. But it does mean you need to plan for the possibility that any vendor, no matter how reputable, can have a bad day.
Organizations should maintain vendor risk assessments that include scenarios for vendor-caused outages. Ask yourself: if our primary security tool goes down tomorrow, what's our fallback plan?
Many organizations discovered during this incident that their business continuity plans existed only on paper. A plan that hasn't been tested is barely better than no plan at all. Regular tabletop exercises and simulation drills ensure that when a real incident occurs, your team knows exactly what to do.
The best time to discover gaps in your incident response plan is during a drill — not during an actual incident.
The CrowdStrike incident highlighted the risks of deploying updates simultaneously across an entire fleet. Organizations should consider implementing staged rollout strategies where updates are deployed to a small subset of machines first, monitored for issues, and then gradually expanded to the full environment.
Traditional disaster recovery planning often focuses on data center failures, network outages, or data loss. This incident reminded us that endpoint-level failures — thousands of individual workstations and servers crashing simultaneously — require their own recovery procedures. Having boot recovery media, automated reimaging capabilities, and clear escalation procedures for mass endpoint failures should be part of every DR plan.
During the outage, organizations that had clear internal communication channels and pre-established incident communication plans were able to respond more effectively. Employees need to know who to contact, what alternate systems to use, and how to continue operations when primary systems are down.
SMBs might think an incident at this scale doesn't apply to them, but the underlying lessons are universal. Every organization that depends on technology — which is every organization — needs to consider what happens when that technology fails unexpectedly.
The key components every SMB should have in place include a documented incident response plan with assigned roles and responsibilities, a business continuity strategy that identifies critical systems and manual fallback procedures, regular backup verification to confirm that data can actually be restored, a vendor management framework that tracks dependencies on third-party services, and a communication plan that covers both internal stakeholders and external customers.
The CrowdStrike incident was a wake-up call for the entire industry. It demonstrated that operational resilience isn't just about preventing cyberattacks — it's about being prepared for any disruption, including the ones that come from the tools designed to protect you. Organizations that invest in comprehensive incident management, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning will be far better positioned to weather the next unexpected disruption, whatever form it takes.
Our team can help you assess and mitigate security risks specific to your business.