How the CrowdStrike breach redefined feature delivery

This summer marks one year since the CrowdStrike outage shook the global tech and enterprise landscape. Caused by a faulty update, the resulting outage led to a widespread IT system crash and took out businesses, governments and industries across the world. Airlines, airports, banks, hospitals, manufacturing, supermarkets and stock markets were all impacted, with 8.5 million Windows devices impacted and over $5 billion losses to US Fortune 500 companies.

As one of the largest scale outages in history, it also marked a turning point for many enterprises which have been forced to recognise how interconnected our global IT systems really are, and how devastating a mistimed or failed feature rollout could be. 

So, one year on, what did businesses learn from the CrowdStrike outage? What did it show senior leaders about the importance of feature management and software rollout specifically, and how can businesses become more resilient in the face of outages to come?

Learnings from CrowdStrike: software management is business critical

Initially regarded as a cautionary tale of vendor dependency and systemic risk, CrowdStrike has since undergone a reputational turnaround. At the start of this year, it announced it had more than recovered the $30 billion loss it made in market value at the height of the crisis, and customers publicly came out to say they were sticking with CrowdStrike, trusting the company to apply the learnings from the outage and become even more resilient.

While CrowdStrike did successfully recover, the events did leave a lasting impression for the wider industry, by exposing enterprises to the importance of managing software rollout closely and securely.

This comes as DevOps teams are still having to manage outages across sectors, especially in consumer banking, where apps have crashed frequently this year – again highlighting how critical it is to control feature management.

And as demand for digital services continues to increase, many platforms originally built on legacy tech systems, must now support diverse devices, operating systems, third-party integrations, and cloud services. But without modern delivery practices, even routine updates can become high-risk deployments.

To prevent future outages and build more dependable digital services, CTOs need to rethink how they modernise their delivery approach and minimise disruption.

Mitigating risk and redefining feature delivery  

Rather than deploying a new feature or update to all users at once, changes are rolled out in controlled stages, starting with a small percentage and expanding only when stability is confirmed, and no further issues are detected. This is especially important for banks. With a staged approach they can check potential impacts before it hits the entire customer base.

Teams need a clear view of the issue before they can respond and effectively address. Continuous monitoring and observability allow DevOps teams to detect abnormal system behaviour immediately. When something does go wrong, automated rollback allows a fast return to the last known good state, minimising user impact and preserving trust.

To meet the expectations of today’s users, businesses need the ability to move quickly, resolve issues in real time, and deploy changes safely. DevOps provides the mindset, practices and technology to make that possible, helping institutions avoid widespread disruption while continuously improving the customer experience.

Reliability is everything. Adopting DevOps isn’t just about preventing the next outage. It’s about building the foundations for a more agile, trustworthy, and future-ready digital services sector.

Resilience is key in the age of outages

The CrowdStrike outage served as a turning point for the industry. It highlighted a clear urgent need for enterprises to rethink how they build and maintain the systems millions rely on daily. Legacy approaches to software delivery simply can’t keep pace with modern demand, and they’re putting customer trust at risk.

For many businesses, this event catalysed a shift in how they assess risk across their software supply chain and underscored the need for greater control in how software changes are delivered. 

The businesses that have learnt from this turning point, will be prioritising continually de-risking their software delivery teams, and figuring out how to ship software faster, smarter, and more safely. One year on and resilience is a boardroom issue, with investment in progressive delivery, observability tools, and controls at the top of the agenda for CTOs and their teams.