T
he CrowdStrike outage that took down almost 300 Fortune 500 companies offers many lessons. However, for us in the website business, there is a very specific takeaway from this fiasco. This is to disable automatic updates.
It really can be that simple. While this was a security update, and speed is of the essence, if there had been some delay built into the process, companies could have saved themselves from being a part of the worldwide chaos that ensued.
Keystone maintains many, many websites. Four days after the CrowdStrike outage, WordPress 6.6.1 was released. This happened to be on the day many of our customer’s websites were scheduled to be updated. Being pragmatic, we proactively delayed the maintenance for several days, until we felt there would be a much lesser chance of incompatibility issues.
You can count on Keystone to balance your website’s security with sound business judgment.