On July 19, 2024, the largest internet outage in history occurred. Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity service provider relied on by many top US companies. The firm regularly provided rapid release updates intended to address the latest threats. The update released that chaotic day in July contained a logic error that, although it was quickly identified and corrected, still caused the failure of millions of Windows-based computers and resulted in more than $5.4 billion in costs to US companies. The disruption caused thousands of flight cancellations, the shutdown of vital hospital systems, and the disruption of financial markets.

A well-known rule of programming is to never push untested code to a production environment. In other words, new software isn’t released for public use before it has been extensively tested in a limited offline system.  In testimony to Congress, Crowdstrike stated that they would treat future releases like code updates by doing exactly that: thoroughly testing code across various scenarios before taking it live and implementing updates in phases.  These are best practices for any coder – whether they work in cybersecurity or stablecoins.

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