2024's Year-End Review: When Enterprise Tech Fell Short
Joshua Carroll
Field CTO @ GitLab | Company Advisor | Empowering customers to build secure, high-quality software, faster!
2024 witnessed catastrophic IT failures that shook major organizations and exposed critical weaknesses in enterprise technology practices. These weren't just technical glitches – they were billion-dollar disasters that shattered customer trust and disrupted essential services across healthcare, transportation, and finance. From crippling cybersecurity outages to AI system meltdowns, a clear pattern emerged: inadequate testing, poor monitoring, and fragmented technology operations led to preventable crises. As we look toward 2025, organizations must embrace comprehensive DevSecOps practices and integrated platforms to build more resilient, secure, and agile systems.
CrowdStrike's Blue Screen of Disaster
In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike led to a massive disruption, affecting about 8.5 million Windows machines, affecting companies across critical sectors like healthcare, transportation, and finance. The update, meant to address a security flaw, instead triggered a boot loop, leaving systems unusable.
At over $5 billion in estimated damages, this incident starkly illustrated how third-party access controls and comprehensive pre-deployment testing aren't optional – they're essential for preventing catastrophic system failures.
AT&T’s Network Collapse
February 2024 saw AT&T's massive network outage leave 125 million mobile users without service for over 12 hours. More critically, the outage affected emergency services, with numerous 911 calls failing to connect. A simple equipment configuration error escalated into a crisis, exposing critical vulnerabilities in their infrastructure and highlighting the urgent need for robust failover systems and rapid rollback capabilities.
McDonald's Digital Ordering Chaos
McDonald's faced a double crisis in March 2024: a widespread POS system outage crippling credit card payments, followed by an AI ordering system malfunction that created chaos by adding excessive items to customers' orders. The incident demonstrated that AI implementation requires careful testing and thoughtful integration with existing systems to prevent automated processes from amplifying errors
UK Retail Chain Disruptions
Major UK retailers including Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Greggs experienced significant POS system outages due to problematic third-party software updates. These failures disrupted customer transactions and highlighted a recurring theme of 2024: organizations need stronger validation protocols for third-party software updates, especially in critical customer-facing systems.
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Acemagic Mini PCs Ship with Malware
In February 2024, Chinese PC manufacturer Acemagic was caught shipping PCs preloaded with malicious software, including RedLine Stealer and Backdoor.Bladabindi. The company blamed developers for cutting boot times without proper security checks! A proper DevSecOps practice would prevented this from being possible, yet again underscoring why security practices must be integrated from the start, not treated as an afterthought.
The UK Post Office Horizon Scandal
I can't close the year without touching on the Post Office scandal, which saw over 700 employees wrongfully accused of theft due to software errors. This tragic case, highlighted by recent media coverage, demonstrates the devastating human cost of inadequate system testing and oversight. It serves as a stark reminder that legacy systems require continuous auditing and documentation, with human impacts always considered paramount.
American Airlines' Holiday Disruption
Even at the time of this writing on Christmas Eve, American Airlines was forced to ground all flights across the USA due to 'a third-party IT vendor issue'. The failure, which affected crucial systems used to monitor flight schedules, caused major disruptions in operations, leaving hundreds of flights canceled and tens of thousands of passengers stranded at such a critical time of the year.
Yet another incident highlighting the risk of over reliance on external vendors and the potential consequences when proper integration, testing, and failover systems are not in place.
Building a More Resilient 2025
These incidents of 2024 share clear patterns - inadequate testing, poor oversight, and an over reliance on outdated systems and third-party tools. The path forward requires organizations to fundamentally shift how they approach risk management and operational resilience.
The solution lies in embracing comprehensive DevSecOps practices: continuous integration, automated testing, and integrated security processes throughout the software lifecycle. GitLab combines these capabilities into one platform and can help prevent the kinds of costly and damaging IT failures we've witnessed this year.
The message from 2024 is unmistakable: technology failures aren't just IT problems – they're business problems that cost billions and affect millions of lives. Organizations that prioritize operational resilience and comprehensive risk management in 2025 will be the ones that thrive.
Happy Holidays everyone, and here's to building more resilient systems in 2025!