
The CrowdStrike Outage: How to Avoid a Future IT Crisis

Real lessons learned from the CrowdStrike outage, and practical steps to help your business avoid a similar future crisis.
The 2024 CrowdStrike outage grounded flights, disrupted hospitals, and took down business systems worldwide - not because of a cyberattack, but because of a faulty software update from a trusted security vendor. It's a case study Minneapolis-St. Paul businesses shouldn't ignore.
What Actually Happened
A routine update to a widely used security tool contained a flaw that caused affected systems to crash, triggering a global IT outage that impacted businesses across nearly every industry, regardless of their own security practices.
The Uncomfortable Lesson
Even businesses doing everything "right" - using a reputable, widely trusted security vendor - were still vulnerable to disruption from a single point of failure entirely outside their control.
What Businesses Should Take Away From This
- •Vendor concentration risk is real: Relying entirely on a single vendor for critical infrastructure creates systemic risk, even when that vendor is highly reputable.
- •Update testing and staged rollouts matter: Automatically applying vendor updates to every system simultaneously removes any buffer against a bad update.
- •Business continuity planning must include non-cyberattack scenarios: Disaster recovery plans built only around ransomware miss failure modes like this one entirely.
- •Recovery speed depends on preparation, not luck: Businesses with tested recovery procedures and documented system configurations recovered faster than those improvising.
Building Resilience Against This Kind of Event
- Consider staged update rollouts for critical systems rather than simultaneous deployment across your entire environment.
- Maintain documented system configurations to speed up recovery from any large-scale disruption.
- Include vendor-caused outages in your business continuity planning, not just malicious attacks.
- Diversify critical dependencies where practical, rather than concentrating all risk in a single vendor.
Veracity Technologies helps Minneapolis-St. Paul businesses build resilient IT infrastructure that accounts for the full range of disruption scenarios - not just the ones that make headlines as cyberattacks.
Ready to strengthen your security posture?
Schedule a free technology and cyber risk audit with our team.
Related Resources
More on Cybersecurity
Published 2025-04-01 · Last reviewed December 2025