07/22/2024

The CrowdStrike Outage

What CEOs and boards should do today

CEOs and board members woke this morning (or were awakened in the night) by word of what, for many of us, is a nightmare scenario: A IT disaster had taken down Windows-based computers across the globe.

For those impacted, it’s a total disaster. But the good news (good-ish news?) is that this wasn’t a deliberate attack by a foreign power, or a hacktivist collective or someone like that. This was the good guys—cyber provider CrowdStrike—screwing up a security update (and watching their stock fall off a table in the aftermath).

But even if it is just a screw up, it is one for the record books, taking down everything from 911 systems to airports to millions of private businesses offline as they struggle to work from DOS-era command prompt lines to delete the killer code.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Chief Executive.