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Cybersecurity 5 min read2025-04-01

The CrowdStrike Outage: How to Avoid a Future IT Crisis

Veracity Technologies Team
By Veracity Technologies Team 2025-04-01

Real lessons learned from the CrowdStrike outage, and practical steps to help your business avoid a similar future crisis.

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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

  1. Consider staged update rollouts for critical systems rather than simultaneous deployment across your entire environment.
  2. Maintain documented system configurations to speed up recovery from any large-scale disruption.
  3. Include vendor-caused outages in your business continuity planning, not just malicious attacks.
  4. 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.

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Published 2025-04-01 · Last reviewed December 2025