The Microsoft-CrowdStrike Incident and its Policy Implications by Dr. Sundeep Oberoi

In this talk, Dr. Sundeep Oberoi presents an analysis of the recent worldwide disruption affecting Windows-based computers. His talk covers the incident details, root causes, and policy considerations surrounding software update practices.
On the 18th of July 2024, there was a major outage of computers running the Windows Operating system. The global spread of this outage was unprecedented. It quickly became apparent that the impacted computers were those where CrowdStrike software was loaded. CrowdStrike is a well-regarded cybersecurity provider. CrowdStrike publicly admitted to a technical failure and provided a fix and remediation advice. Systems were out of operation for more than 24 hours in many cases, resulting in significant disruption and financial loss. This talk describes what happened and assesses the root causes and policy implications of the way the software industry provides and updates software.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Sundeep Oberoi is an Adjunct Professor with the Ashank Desai Center for Policy Studies at IIT Bombay and is also associated with IITB Trust Lab. His research interest is in the area of Digital Societies and Technology Policy. He has 36 years of industry, research and entrepreneurial experience in diverse areas of Information and Communication Technology. His experience spans a wide spectrum of experience in the Delivery Management of large and critical programmes, technology development, product development, channel development and management, business development, system integration and management of research laboratories. He has a B.Tech degree from IIT Kanpur, M.Tech from IIT Delhi and Ph.D. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay.