5 Lessons from the CrowdStrike Crash: Insights for Software Engineering
The need for rigorous testing, gradual rollouts, and best practices to boost software development velocity while ensuring system reliability.
The recent CrowdStrike outage, which wreaked havoc on global IT systems, serves as a stark reminder of the complexities and risks inherent in modern software development. This incident, triggered by a faulty update, offers valuable lessons for software engineers and developers on best practices, risk management, and the importance of thorough testing.
Understanding the Outage
On Friday (July 19, 2024) a botched update from CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, caused significant disruptions across various sectors. The update, which affected Windows-based systems worldwide, led to widespread failures in critical infrastructure such as airports and hospitals. The issue stemmed from a NULL pointer error in the code, a problem that was exacerbated by the update’s forced deployment.
The Lessons Learnt:
The CrowdStrike crash highlights the need for rigorous best practices to boost software development velocity while ensuring system reliability, including:
