What the CrowdStrike outage taught us about recovery
A bad update stopped millions of Windows PCs. The companies that recovered fast had one thing ready: their BitLocker keys.
On Friday a faulty CrowdStrike update made around 8.5 million Windows machines crash on boot. Airlines, banks and hospitals stopped. It wasn’t an attack. It was a bad file pushed to a security tool that runs deep inside Windows.
The fix was simple and painful: boot each machine into safe mode and delete one file, by hand. Many companies then hit the real wall: the disks were encrypted with BitLocker, and the recovery keys were stored on servers that were also down.
What to sort out now:
- Can you get your BitLocker recovery keys when every Windows server is down? Export them somewhere offline and safe.
- Who can visit each machine, and how fast? Remote sites and kiosks took the longest.
- Stage updates where the vendor lets you: a small group first, everyone later.
- Write the “all PCs won’t boot” plan now, including how staff talk to each other if email is down.
Security tools need deep access to do their job. That’s exactly why a mistake in one can stop everything. Plan for the bad day, not only the attack.