12 Days of Data Centre Christmas: July 2024
Microsoft & CrowdStrike IT Outage Impact on Data Centres
It was the story that gripped the headlines within the technology world this year, with millions of people facing disruption and major companies around the world being forced to halt services.
The outage impacted Windows PCs and was as a result of a faulty Microsoft update by CrowdStrike. The cybersecurity company admitted an update to its antivirus software had suffered a malfunction.
At the time, Brandon Hart, CTO of Everything Blockchain Inc. and Justin Endres, CRO of Seclore, explained to Data Centre Magazine the possible impact of such an IT outage on the global data centre industry.
Impact on Microsoft Azure
CrowdStrike is noted for its advanced cloud-native platform that protects critical areas of enterprise risk, such as endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.
Its CrowdStrike Falcon platform protects workloads - such as containers, running in all environments, from public and private clouds to on-premises and hybrid data centres.
One of the first data centres to feel the heat from the outage was Microsoft Azure, which offers services to on-premises data centres. This service allows businesses to build and run hybrid applications to ensure consistent Azure experiences across private and public clouds, whilst supporting services like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
"A backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the Central US region,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This resulted in the compute resources automatically restarting when connectivity was lost to virtual disks.”
The company also said that mitigation was confirmed for all Azure Storage clusters.
“A small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact. Impacted customers will be continuing to communicate through the Azure service health portal," the statement concluded.
Vulnerabilities for data centres
Speaking at the time, Seclore warned of single source vulnerability for data centres. For Justin Endres, CRO of Seclore, the issue was largely MS Windows OS systems impacting data centres.
“Google’s compute engine and Azure reported outages which is why we saw banks, airlines and so on all taken offline,” he explained at the time. “North America saw only a fraction of what Asia experienced. CRWD runs at high privilege so the impact is significant. Recovery will be measured in weeks, not hours, given many of the impacted systems will need to be rebuilt manually.”
Justin was clear that where technology diversity is low in the enterprise, single points of failure can create these issues.
“For all the ‘single throat to choke’ advocates, there won’t be enough neck to choke at CRWD and no one is going to feel better,” he explained. “The single source approach firms are taking, especially with MSFT, is a dangerous one. This incident is an example of that. Single OS/EDR/Cloud instances, just like single source supply chains, are fragile.”
Likewise, as the outage primarily impacted Windows systems, Brandon Hart, CTO of Everything Blockchain Inc., knew that this would lead to significant issues in data centres.
“As data centres face significant downtime, impacting service availability and reliability due to the BSOD issues,” he said.
“The reliance on CrowdStrike for endpoint protection may lead to increased vulnerabilities until all systems are patched and data centres might need to reallocate resources to manage these outages, affecting other planned activities.”
If a similar outage were to happen again, data centres may not be so lucky.
See also in July
Google’s Report Shifts Focus onto Data Centre Emissions
AI and Data Centres: Ensuring the Next Era is Sustainable
Trane: Pioneers of Data Centre Cooling Sustainability
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