Crowdstrike is the world’s largest cybersecurity firm. They were trusted by much of the Fortune 500, governments, and public services worldwide.
But, just one coding error turned them into the world’s most infamous cybersecurity firm due to the raw scale of the issue. In July of 2024, Crowdstrike pushed out an update that immediately crashed every computer that received the update.
They spotted the issue relatively early and only 8.5 million computers were affected. However, many of these 8.5 million computers were at the hearts and souls of corporate and government infrastructure leading to massive global outages.
And the worst part is that all of this could have been avoided if Crowdstrike had followed industry standard staging practices. This video explains the Crowdstrike incident and how one coding error led to $5.4 billion in losses.