CrowdStrike Incident Impact

On Friday, July 19, 2024 a global outage for many systems running Windows occurred after Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released an update to their Falcon Sensor for Windows. This release triggered a boot crash loop on affected Windows 10+ machines running the CrowdStrike software that required manual and direct access to recover from. You can read full details of the incident at CrowdStrike's page here. These failures had a widespread and significant downstream impact.

No GRAX Impact

GRAX installs the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor on all cloud infrastructure. However, GRAX deploys Linux on all compute infrastructure and all internal user workstations use MacOS. As a result, GRAX was not directly impacted and our vendors reported limited disruption. Overall, we observed no impact to our services or customer data.

Preventative and Mitigating Measures

Because of the potential for such widespread and critical outages, GRAX takes extensive steps to secure systems against unexpected service interruptions and to mitigate the impact if any such interruptions should occur. If GRAX had been running a number of Windows machines or CrowdStrike had instead released an update to their Linux sensor, any environments managed by GRAX would have been recoverable within hours as long as public cloud providers and necessary GRAX vendors were operational.

Please reference GRAX Security documentation for additional information: