Incident reporting is a crucial component of maintaining cybersecurity and operational resilience across the European Union. As outlined in Article 23 of the NIS2 Directive entities falling under its scope are required to report “significant incidents” to the CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Team or the relevant competent authority without undue delay.

The events of Friday the 19th 2024 had a profound impact on organizations around the globe. I suppose a widespread global IT outage has a way of clarifying the mind—and IT leaders are recognizing that resilience is crucial for maintaining operations for their consumers, customers, staff, partners, and shareholders. But much of the post-mortem analysis seems to be misunderstanding key lessons from the outage.

The blue screen of death (BSOD) triggered on July 19, 2024, in Windows environments worldwide was caused by a faulty update of the CrowdStrike Falcon Senor’s Endpoint Detection and Response component.

In the early morning of July 19, a software update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor started to cause one of the most extensive IT outages in history, affecting several industry sectors, including financial services, healthcare, transportation, and others. According to CrowdStrike, the outage stemmed from “a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts.” At this point, the software update has not affected Mac and Linux systems.

On July 19, 2024, a botched CrowdStrike Falcon sensor update for Windows operating systems led to the largest IT outage in recent history. Although the issue stemmed from a technical malfunction, it inadvertently opened the door for real threat actors to exploit the situation. This incident has triggered a wave of malicious activities, particularly targeting CrowdStrike’s Latin American (LATAM) customers.

SenseOn is a direct competitor to CrowdStrike. On 19th July 2024 BST, an update to CrowdStrike endpoint software caused worldwide IT outages that resulted in over 8 million Windows devices being disabled. This caused major disruption to organisations in a range of industries, including aviation and healthcare. Quality assurance gaps and deployment processes were not the only factors, or even the most significant factors, in the widespread disruption.

On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity company, experienced a significant outage caused by a faulty software update. This incident impacted millions of Windows machines across multiple industries, including transportation, defense, manufacturing, and finance. CrowdStrike has released an official statement and is posting updates on their blog. Microsoft has also published a blog with remediations, which we encourage you to review.

By now, everyone is aware of the CrowdStrike Falcon update that caused major disruptions to key services such as hospitals, flights, news channels, and millions of end-user and cloud-based Windows machines worldwide. Details, including recovery options, can be found in the CrowdStrike advisory. At Indusface, designing for failure is a core tenet that we use while building all our SaaS products. After all, despite the best processes, checks, and balances, any system can fail.

In the early morning hours of Friday, July 19, a single software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sparked an unprecedented global IT outage. The incident continues to impact organizations, governments, and end users around the world, disrupting everything from mission-critical infrastructure and airlines to hospitals, retailers, and more. We at 11:11 Systems understand the gravity of this unfortunate situation and want to wish all of those affected a quick and complete recovery.