Lessons learned from CrowdStrike outages on releasing software updates

CrowdStrike's faulty software update in July 2024 caused global outages, affecting flights, payments, and emergency services. Professor Justin Cappos emphasized the need for gradual updates and rollback capabilities. "Software updates themselves are essential,” he said. “This is not a cautionary tale against software updates … Do take this as a cautionary tale about vendors needing to do better software supply chain QA. There are tons of things out there, many are free and open source, many are used widely within industry. This is not a problem that no one knows how to solve. This is just an issue where an organization has taken inadequate steps to handle this and brought a lot of attention to a really important issue that I hope gets fixed in a good way.”