Observations On The Microsoft & CloudStrike Outage

On Friday last week, Bhavya Dilipkumar sent me a message - ‘"Just wanted to check. Any impact due to Azure outage within SaaS firmsM"’. I did not know that Azure had an outage (I was not checking the news)? and our cloud infrastructure was not dependent on the Azure platform. Immediately upon this message, I looked it up and read that Microsoft servers were down. I thought this could be a server attack or some system outage. My immediate thought was with a company like Microsoft, this issue will be fixed in a few hours if not already.?

Not long after, I began hearing about flight cancellations (several thousand flights canceled) across the world and several flight delays, passengers not able to book tickets and more. This was BIG and day to day life was affected in some sense at many places across the globe. This clearly demonstrated our over reliance on companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google and likes.?

CrowdStrike:?

As I learnt more about the problem, like a lot of people, I discovered a company called CrowdStrike. Founded in 2011, this company plays a major role in helping organizations identify and contain cyber security threats. A software update by CrowdStrike to its Falcon platform on Microsoft servers had caused this outage.?

There was also a frequently used acronym trending online: ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ (BSOD) — an error screen on Microsoft Windows indicating a system crash.?

Source: Google Trends

Because the Crowdstrike update to its Falcon platform failed, it resulted in BSOD and chaos to companies that used CrowdStrike.? They called it ‘Logic Flaw’ and you can find their update here.? However, this issue was isolated to Crowdstrike and Microsoft. Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted because of this.

Messaging:

Mistakes happen and I was looking for communication from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. This is what he had to say - “Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”??

As you read Satya’s message, you may also wonder why is his messaging not detailed enough, why is he not talking about the root cause of this issue and more?? However, as you delve more, you will understand that this is not a Microsoft problem but a CrowdStrike issue.? George Kurtz, the Founder & CEO of Crowdstrike had a more detailed explanation for the origins of the problem, that you can find here.?

Let’s prepare for the worst:

Though this is an isolated incident to CrowdStrike users on the Microsoft platforms, this could happen to any platform. Based on the platform we are in, it could affect us. This will not be the last incident and could also be a precursor for something even worse.?

Though there is a lot of news around this, I bet that the majority of the global population that was unaffected, do not even care or know that this happened. As much as we love technology and how it enables us to do different things, it will also be good to equip ourselves to survive without any fancy tools. We should experiment a few days this way and get into isolation with our loved ones. Our life revolves around major tech. providers and we should prepare for the worst. We will remain least impacted this way.

This situation was also a testament to the importance of communicating in a timely manner. Crisis can hit any business at any time, and they are remembered for how they respond to these crises.?

I would love to hear your feedback or thoughts on this post (if any). Is this post accurate or do you see any errors in reasoning???

Thank you.