Microsoft to Host Summit on Resiliency After July CrowdStrike Outage

Microsoft plans to meet with CrowdStrike, other providers of endpoint security technologies and government representatives to discuss ways to improve resiliency and protect the critical infrastructure of the companies’ mutual customers.

The meeting, dubbed the Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit, will be hosted by Microsoft at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters on Sept. 10, the company said in a Friday (Aug. 23) blog post.

“Our objective is to discuss concrete steps we will all take to improve security and resiliency for our joint customers,” Aidan Marcuss, corporate vice president, Microsoft Windows and Devices, wrote in the post.

The event follows the July CrowdStrike outage, the blog post noted.

“The CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 presents important lessons for us to apply as an ecosystem,” Marcuss wrote in the post. “Our discussions will focus on improving security and safe deployment practices, designing systems for resiliency and working together as a thriving community of partners to best serve customers now, and in the future.”

Marcuss added in the post that the presence of government representatives will ensure transparency of this collaborative effort, that the summit will lead to both short-term and long-term next steps, and that updates on these conversations will be shared after the event.

The July outage Marcuss mentioned grounded flights, disrupted banks and financial services, knocked doctors’ booking services offline and caused other havoc when it struck users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The outage stemmed from a software update by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm.

“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet structure,” Ciarin Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, told Reuters when interviewed for a July 19 report on the incident.

The event put software updates under the microscope. Adam Lowe, Ph.D., chief product and innovation officer at CompoSecure/Arculus with more than a decade of experience with software updates, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in July that issues with essential security software like CrowdStrike can escalate dramatically. If an update disrupts core system functions, particularly at the Windows startup level, rectifying the problem can be daunting.