Why CrowdStrike-style chaos is here to stay

Countless theories for the cybersecurity firm’s outage are flying around, but whatever the reason, this sort of thing is likely to happen again

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“Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question.

We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50m.