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The CrowdStrike outage occurred on July 19, 2024 leading to millions of Windows systems failing worldwide and displaying the infamous blue screen of death (BSoD). This massive outage was triggered by a botched software update from security vendor CrowdStrike, impacting an estimated 674,000 direct customer relationships of CrowdStrike and Microsoft and causing an indirect impact on more than 49 million entities. The downtime caused by the outage has ranged between two days and a week with many companies still struggling to fully recover.

Salvador Technologies reports that its critical infrastructure and industrial customers using the company’s cyber-incident recovery platform for automating their recovery processes and securing their systems were able to return to full and normal operations within minutes of understanding that their systems and machines were down due to the CrowdStrike outage. In most instances, customers were able to execute their recovery even before their main IT servers were available.

“The CIO of a leading medical center customer told us last week that the CrowdStrike outage initially suspended the operations of thousands of workstations throughout its main facility. Manually restarting and fixing these workstations would have required several days of nonstop work, putting the lives of patients at risk, while costing the hospital millions of dollars in labor costs and operational downtime,” explained Alex Yevtushenko, Co-Founder and CEO of Salvador Technologies. “We are proud to report that our platform enabled this hospital and many additional critical infrastructure customers to independently recover from the outage with minimal downtime and without reliance on a resolution from CrowdStrike.”
Salvador Technologies has tens of critical infrastructure and industrial customers in manufacturing, water, energy, maritime and additional sectors, mostly in the United States and Europe.

Salvador Technologies’ air-gapped cyber-incident recovery platform consists of hardware connected to the HMI or SCADA, an agent software and a monitoring system, enabling full visibility of the operations. The platform protects customer data from being attacked and, in case of an incident, bypasses standard recovery protocols to enable a full recovery from cyber-incidents and any malfunction within minutes.

“The CrowdStrike outage serves as a stark reminder that cyber-incidents, whether from IT failure or cyber-attacks, are inevitable,” added Yevtushenko. “Going forward, CISOs must not only focus on preventive measures, but also build a robust recovery strategy and solution to maintain operational continuity and minimize the downtime impact of unavoidable incidents.”