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The Unexpected CrowdStrike Outage and How Dizzion Saved the Day

· 3 min read
Carsten Puls

The Unexpected CrowdStrike Outage and How Dizzion Saved the Day

In the fast-paced world of IT, unexpected outages and issues can strike at any moment, causing significant disruption to businesses. Last week, CrowdStrike, one of the largest providers of enterprise cybersecurity software, experienced an incident that underscores the power and agility of digital workspaces and the huge difference having a trusted managed services provider can make.

The Largest IT Outage in History

Early Friday morning, just after midnight, CrowdStrike pushed a regular update to their Falcon sensors on their customers’ Windows machines, including servers and desktops. Unfortunately, this update led to many instances of what we all saw in the news - the Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) which rendered them inoperable.

While CrowdStrike quickly issued a corrective update, the mitigation process was not automatic. It typically required manual intervention to recover and reboot the affected Windows machines. For most CrowdStrike customers, this resulted in the need for significant IT intervention, causing massive operational disruptions, adversely affecting customers and their businesses.

The Dizzion Difference

For our customers using CrowdStrike in their Dizzion Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) environments, the story was quite different. Our Dizzion Flex customers, who manage their DaaS deployment on their own, were able to restore any impacted virtual desktops from a backup with just a few clicks.

For our Dizzion Managed and Complete customers, the experience was even smoother, as our managed services team detected and resolved the issues on impacted desktops and servers before business hours in the U.S. on Friday morning.

This proactive management meant that in most cases, Dizzion customers did not experience any significant issues. Our team of experts worked around the clock on Friday to ensure that the mitigation and recovery processes were handled swiftly and efficiently, providing our customers with uninterrupted service and peace of mind.

The Value of DaaS

Silver linings from the largest IT outage in history will be hard to come by, but one of them was certainly how organizations who have adopted DaaS were able to recover swiftly and mitigate disruptions to their business and customers. In addition, customers using a fully managed DaaS solution such as Dizzion Managed or Complete, benefited from having a dedicated team of experts at the ready to handle the situation for them.

Dizzion is proud to be able to say that July 19, 2024 was just “another Friday” for our customers.

At Dizzion, we are committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service and support, ensuring their IT infrastructure remains robust and resilient, no matter what challenges arise. If you’re looking for peace of mind and expert management of your end-user computing environment, consider the advantages of Dizzion Managed.

Stay protected, stay efficient, and let us manage your IT needs so you can focus on what you do best.

About the Author

Carsten Puls

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Carsten Puls
As COO of Dizzion, Carsten is focused on Dizzion operations including service deilvery, solution architecture, customer success, cloud operations and technical support. Carsten has spent over 30 years creating new market categories and building the organizations that power them. Virtualization has been a common thread starting in 1995 with National Instruments, the virtual instrumentation company. At NI, he authored the open PXI standard and founded the organization that grew it to a >$1B market. In 2000, he joined ClearCube and helped drive the creation of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) market. He founded Key Crossing in 2006 to assist other virtualization companies including Teradici (used by VMware and AWS, later acquired by HP), Calista (acquired by Microsoft for RemoteFX) and NComputing, which he joined a year later. At NComputing, he led product to drive over 20 million seats of virtual computing worldwide.