SEATTLE — Seattle-area technology experts say one of the reasons the Crowdstrike outage was so widespread is simple: it's one of the most popular cybersecurity firms, known for quickly rolling out fixes for fast-changing threats. The company is still working out the reason for the bug, but some say this will be a signal to review all testing procedures and rollout processes to see if anything could have been done to prevent it.
Troy Batterberry is the CEO and co-founder of Kirkland-based start-up EchoMark and has worked in the western Washington-based technology industry for decades.
"[Crowdstrike is] a very good vendor and they do very good work, but when this bug got introduced, it brought all these machines down literally around the world," Batterberry said. "It's being described as one of the worst software incidents in history."
Erik Moore, program director for Seattle University's Online MS in Cybersecurity Leadership, says cybersecurity threats change fast in today's landscape.
"This new level of response needs to happen in seconds rather than minutes, whereas before, we saw it change from months to weeks, then weeks to days," Moore said.
Moore says Crowdstrike is known for acting fast to address new threats, and that's part of the reason they've become so popular—leading to worldwide disruptions. He says it's about building a balance between fast response and safe deployment.
"Now they really need to work on that deployment infrastructure, whether its further testing, staged deployments, other types of reviews, whatever they need to do," Moore said.
Batterberry shared similar feedback.
"For a lot of software companies, when they roll out changes, they'll do gradual rollouts," Batterberry said. "In the industry we refer to those as rings or progressive rollouts, and you do that careful rollout to prevent exactly what we saw today. If you do a very fast rollout across everyone and you have a bug in it, you can affect literally hundreds of millions of people."
Batterberry says Crowdstrike and other providers face the challenge of balancing a methodical approach with quickly obtaining organizations' safety and protection.
"A lot of people are gonna be very frustrated," Batterberry said. "I myself flew back from JFK last night, and while I missed the impact of this, my flight was delayed for other reasons, so I can empathize. [Though] without them, we'd have even more outages because the malware vendors and viruses out here are very real, and they're constantly attacking organizations and do tremendous damage without this technology in place."