.png)
Lessons from the CrowdStrike Windows Outage: How to Strengthen Your Incident Response Plan
Updated: Oct 28
Introduction: Lessons from the CrowdStrike Windows Outage
On 19 July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike triggered widespread disruption to Microsoft Windows systems, affecting organisations across multiple industries, including aviation, banking, healthcare and retail. The incident disrupted critical operations, delayed services and exposed the scale of organisational dependence on shared technology infrastructure.
The outage demonstrated how a seemingly isolated technology failure can rapidly develop into a widespread operational disruption. Organisations relying on the same technology provider experienced simultaneous failures, creating challenges for incident response, business continuity and recovery. The consequences extended beyond the affected systems, impacting employees, customers and the delivery of essential services.
The incident remains a valuable case study for organisations seeking to strengthen their operational resilience. It highlights the importance of understanding technology dependencies, maintaining effective incident response arrangements and ensuring that recovery capabilities can operate under challenging conditions.
For risk leaders and operational teams, the lessons extend beyond preventing technology failures. Effective incident response requires clear responsibilities, timely escalation, coordinated decision-making and tested recovery arrangements. The following ten recommendations provide practical considerations for strengthening incident response plans and improving organisational preparedness for future disruptions.
Immediate Lessons Learned
The CrowdStrike Windows outage provides several practical lessons for organisations seeking to strengthen their incident response capabilities and operational resilience. These ten considerations can help organisations assess their preparedness, identify potential weaknesses and improve their ability to manage future disruptions.
Regular Backups: Maintain secure, regularly updated backups of critical data and systems, including appropriate off-site or isolated storage. Test restoration procedures to confirm that data and services can be recovered within acceptable timeframes.
Develop an Incident Response Plan: Establish and regularly review incident response procedures covering identification, assessment, escalation, containment and recovery. Define clear responsibilities, decision-making authority and coordination arrangements across relevant business functions.
Establish Communication Channels: Maintain effective communication protocols for employees, customers, third-party providers and other stakeholders. Establish alternative channels in case primary communication systems become unavailable, and ensure updates remain timely, accurate and consistent.
Monitor Vendor Management: Assess the incident management and recovery capabilities of critical third-party providers. Understand dependencies, establish clear notification and escalation arrangements, and ensure contractual expectations support timely information sharing and coordinated recovery.
Implement Redundancy Systems: Establish appropriate redundancy and failover arrangements for critical systems and services. Assess whether alternative systems share common dependencies that could expose them to simultaneous disruption, and regularly test their effectiveness.
Conduct Training and Simulations: Provide regular training and conduct realistic incident simulations involving operational teams, IT, business continuity and senior leadership. Include scenarios involving widespread technology failures, third-party dependencies and competing recovery priorities.
Review Security Protocols: Regularly assess security controls, software update procedures and change management practices. Ensure that critical technology changes are appropriately tested, monitored and supported by effective rollback or recovery arrangements to reduce the potential impact of unexpected failures.
Perform Post-Incident Analysis: Conduct structured post-incident reviews to identify underlying causes, contributing factors and weaknesses in response or recovery arrangements. Translate findings into measurable improvements, assign clear accountability and monitor remediation through to completion.
Engage with Stakeholders: Maintain proactive engagement with customers, employees, regulators and other relevant stakeholders throughout significant disruptions. Understand their concerns, communicate expected recovery progress and incorporate stakeholder impacts into incident prioritisation and decision-making.
Ensure Legal and Compliance Alignment: Review incident response arrangements against applicable legal, regulatory and contractual obligations, including incident notification, reporting and recordkeeping requirements. Ensure that responsibilities, escalation thresholds and reporting timelines are clearly defined and regularly tested.
The CrowdStrike outage demonstrates how technology dependencies can amplify the consequences of an operational incident across multiple organisations and business services. Effective preparedness therefore requires more than documented response procedures. Organisations need to understand their critical dependencies, establish clear decision-making arrangements and demonstrate that their recovery capabilities can operate under realistic disruption scenarios.
Regulatory developments reinforce the importance of these capabilities. The Bank of England's PS16/24 policy on Critical Third Parties (CTPs) establishes operational resilience requirements for designated critical third parties, including risk management, scenario testing and incident reporting. Although these specific requirements apply to designated CTPs, the framework provides useful considerations for organisations assessing the resilience of their critical service providers and the effectiveness of their third-party risk management arrangements.
Strengthen Your Operational Resilience Capability
Explore how Aevitium's Operational Resilience Pathway™ helps organisations assess operational resilience maturity, strengthen incident management and response capabilities, and improve their ability to withstand, respond to and recover from disruption.
Incident Response Planning
Develop and regularly review a comprehensive incident response plan that establishes clear procedures for identifying, assessing, escalating and managing incidents. The plan should define responsibilities, communication protocols, decision-making authority and recovery priorities, ensuring that teams can respond effectively when disruption occurs.
The CrowdStrike outage demonstrated how a technology incident can quickly affect multiple business functions and services simultaneously. In such circumstances, effective incident management depends on coordination between IT, operational teams, risk management, business continuity, third-party providers and senior leadership. Clear escalation criteria and defined decision-making responsibilities help organisations establish a consistent understanding of the incident, prioritise critical activities and allocate resources where they are most needed.
Incident response arrangements should also recognise that the nature and impact of an incident can evolve as new information becomes available. Regular reassessment, timely escalation and effective information sharing enable organisations to adjust their response as the disruption develops, particularly when multiple incidents or affected services share common underlying dependencies.
Regular exercises and post-incident reviews should be used to validate these arrangements, identify weaknesses and incorporate lessons learned. The objective is to ensure that incident response plans remain practical, understood and capable of supporting coordinated decisions under real operating conditions.
Why Coordinated Recovery Matters
The CrowdStrike outage also illustrates the importance of coordination across an organisation during a major technology disruption. While technical remediation is essential, the effectiveness of recovery also depends on how organisations share information, establish priorities, allocate resources and coordinate decisions across affected business functions.
The following illustration highlights how connected governance can support a more coordinated response, while fragmented responsibilities and competing priorities can create additional recovery challenges.
Crisis Communication
Establish clear and effective communication protocols to ensure that employees, customers, third-party providers and other relevant stakeholders receive timely, accurate and consistent information during an incident. Communication arrangements should define responsibilities, escalation channels, approval processes and the frequency of updates, allowing organisations to maintain coordination and manage expectations throughout the disruption.
The CrowdStrike outage highlighted the challenges of communicating during widespread technology failures, particularly when normal communication channels or supporting systems may themselves be affected. Organisations should therefore establish alternative communication methods and ensure that critical contact information remains accessible during an outage.
Effective communication also depends on maintaining a consistent understanding of the incident across different functions. IT teams may focus on technical recovery, while operational teams assess service disruption, customer impacts and business continuity requirements. Coordinating these perspectives enables leadership to make informed decisions, prioritise recovery activities and communicate realistic expectations to affected stakeholders.
Communication should evolve as the incident develops, with regular updates distinguishing confirmed information from emerging assessments and outstanding uncertainties. This helps organisations maintain transparency, avoid premature assumptions and provide stakeholders with a reliable picture of the situation, even when the full extent of the disruption remains unclear.
Regular testing of communication protocols, including alternative channels and third-party coordination, helps ensure that these arrangements remain effective when normal operations are disrupted.
Backup and Redundancy
Maintain reliable backup systems and redundancy arrangements to minimise disruption and support timely recovery during an incident. Regularly review backup procedures, recovery capabilities and alternative operating arrangements to ensure they remain aligned with business needs.
The CrowdStrike outage highlighted an important consideration: redundancy is only effective when alternative systems are sufficiently independent of the technology or infrastructure affected by the original failure. Organisations may have multiple systems or recovery environments that share the same underlying dependencies, leaving them vulnerable to a common point of failure.
Regular testing should therefore go beyond confirming that backups are available. It should demonstrate that critical systems and business services can be restored within acceptable timeframes, including scenarios involving widespread disruption, limited technical resources or simultaneous failures.
Understanding these dependencies and testing recovery arrangements under realistic conditions helps organisations establish whether their resilience capabilities can deliver the expected outcomes when they are most needed.
Discover how organisations can strengthen critical service delivery, manage interconnected vulnerabilities and demonstrate their ability to withstand, recover from and adapt to disruption.
Training and Testing
Conduct regular training and testing exercises to ensure employees understand their responsibilities during an incident and can respond effectively under challenging conditions. Training should extend beyond IT and incident management teams to include operational functions, business continuity representatives, senior leadership and other stakeholders involved in coordinating the response and recovery.
The CrowdStrike outage demonstrated the importance of preparing for scenarios where multiple systems and business services are disrupted simultaneously. Testing should therefore incorporate realistic conditions, including widespread technology failures, unavailable communication channels, dependencies on third-party providers and competing demands for limited recovery resources.
Exercises should also assess how effectively teams identify emerging impacts, escalate concerns, coordinate decisions and adapt their response as new information becomes available. Tabletop simulations and practical recovery exercises provide complementary perspectives, allowing organisations to evaluate both decision-making effectiveness and their ability to restore critical operations within acceptable timeframes.
The value of testing ultimately depends on how organisations use the results. Lessons learned should inform improvements to incident response procedures, recovery arrangements, roles and responsibilities, with identified weaknesses assigned clear ownership and tracked through to resolution. Repeated testing should then demonstrate whether these improvements have strengthened the organisation's response capability.
By embedding training and testing into regular operational practices, organisations can build familiarity, strengthen cross-functional coordination and develop greater confidence in their ability to manage significant disruptions.
Taking Action
The lessons from the CrowdStrike outage provide an opportunity for organisations to reassess their incident response preparedness and strengthen their ability to manage significant operational disruptions.
Audit Your Current Plans: Review existing incident response and business continuity arrangements to identify gaps in responsibilities, escalation procedures, technology dependencies and recovery capabilities. Assess whether these plans remain aligned with current business operations and critical service requirements.
Implement Targeted Improvements: Prioritise identified weaknesses based on their potential operational impact. Strengthen coordination across functions, address critical dependencies and ensure that recovery arrangements are supported by clear ownership, appropriate resources and measurable outcomes.
Educate and Train Your Team: Ensure employees and senior leadership understand their roles during an incident. Conduct regular training and realistic simulations to test decision-making, communication, escalation and recovery capabilities, incorporating lessons learned into ongoing improvements.
Conclusion
The CrowdStrike Windows outage remains a valuable reminder of how interconnected technology dependencies can turn a single failure into widespread operational disruption. It also reinforces the importance of maintaining effective incident response arrangements that extend beyond technical recovery to encompass business continuity, stakeholder communication and coordinated decision-making.
Organisations can strengthen their resilience by regularly reviewing their response plans, understanding critical dependencies and testing their ability to recover under realistic conditions. The effectiveness of these arrangements ultimately depends on how well they operate in practice, particularly when multiple services are affected and recovery resources are constrained.
Effective incident response is measured by an organisation's ability to manage disruption, make informed decisions and restore critical services when it matters most.
About the Author: Julien Haye
Julien Haye is Managing Director of Aevitium LTD and a former Chief Risk Officer with over 26 years of experience across global financial services and non-profit organisations. Known for his pragmatic, people-first approach, he helps organisations strengthen risk management, governance and resilience to support better strategic decisions.
He is the author of The Risk Within: Cultivating Psychological Safety for Strategic Decision-Making and Resilient Risk Management (Kogan Page, 2026). He also hosts the RiskMasters podcast, where he explores risk, leadership and organisational resilience with industry leaders and change makers.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Who should take ownership when a technology incident affects multiple business functions?
Ownership should reflect the nature and impact of the incident. IT may lead technical remediation, while operational leaders remain accountable for managing disruption to their respective business services. Where several functions are affected, a designated incident leader or crisis management structure should coordinate enterprise-wide priorities, resource allocation and escalation.
Clear accountability is particularly important when technical recovery decisions have consequences for customers, regulatory obligations or other critical business activities.
2. How should organisations prioritise recovery when several critical services are disrupted simultaneously?
Recovery priorities should reflect the potential impact on customers, critical business services, regulatory obligations and the organisation's established impact tolerances. Technical dependencies and available recovery resources also influence the sequence in which services can realistically be restored.
These priorities should be agreed through an appropriate governance structure and reassessed as the incident develops. A technically convenient recovery sequence may not always correspond to the organisation's most pressing business needs.
3. How can organisations assess whether third-party dependencies create concentration risk?
Organisations should identify where multiple critical services rely on the same technology provider, infrastructure component or subcontractor. This assessment should consider both direct contractual relationships and dependencies embedded within wider technology supply chains.
Mapping these relationships can reveal common points of failure that may be overlooked when third-party risks are assessed individually. Organisations can then evaluate whether existing contingency arrangements provide meaningful alternatives or remain exposed to the same underlying disruption.