25-Jul-24 11:00

Eli Serota, Director in Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Communications, FTI Consulting

Last Friday, a Microsoft-Crowdstrike update error caused one of the worst IT outages in history and this impacted over 8.5 million Microsoft devices around the world.

To provide more scope on this, more than 3,000 flights within, into, or out of the US were cancelled on July 19, with more than 11,000 delayed. Planes continued to be grounded in the days since, with nearly 2,500 flights cancelled within, into, or out of the US, and more than 38,000 delayed, three days after the outage occurred.

The outage also significantly impacted the healthcare industry, with some healthcare systems and hospitals postponing all or most procedures and clinicians resorting to pen and paper, unable to access Electronic Health Records. On the same day, CrowdStrike CEO, George Kurtz, apologised to the company's customers and partners for crashing their Windows systems.

In light of this recent incident, today we breakdown how important cybersecurity is to modern-day businesses, some of the early preparation efforts companies should consider to avoid being in a similar situation and what to expect next in such fallout cases. Helping us with this is Eli Serota, Director in Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Communications at FTI Consulting.