Following July’s CrowdStrike outage, this is how we can avoid the next ‘Blue Friday’By Lorenzo PupilloOn 19 July, the world experienced ‘Blue Friday’ when 8.5 million PC screens worldwide were hit by the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), a critical error message displayed by Microsoft Windows when the system encounters a serious issue that it cannot recover from.This unprecedented outage was triggered by a faulty update from CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity provider. The disruption affected government services, emergency operations, transport, payment systems and financial markets across the world.While not a cyberattack, its scale was historic and raised two major concerns. First, the failure stemmed from a CrowdStrike update that was meant to protect networks. Second, fixing the problem required manual intervention – rebooting each computer into Windows’ Safe Mode and applying a patch, a very time-consuming process when you’re talking about millions of devices.Some have since argued that new regulation is necessary to ensure such a shock doesn’t happen again – in the EU, this isn’t necessary. We already have what we need in the form of two strong pieces of legislation, the Network and Information System 2 Directive (NIS2) and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). They just need to be implemented properly, combined with better preparedness and a concerted effort to expand the number of trusted security software providers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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