Abstract: On the 18th of July 2024, there was a major outage of computers running the Windows Operating system. The global spread of this outage was unprecedented. It quickly became apparent that the impacted computers were those where CrowdStrike software was loaded. CrowdStrike is a well-regarded cybersecurity provider. CrowdStrike publicly admitted to a technical failure and provided a fix and remediation advice. Systems were out of operation for more than 24 hours in many cases, resulting in significant disruption and financial loss. This talk describes what happened and assesses the root causes and policy implications of the way the software industry provides and updates software.

Speaker: Dr Sundeep Oberoi has 36 years of industry, research and entrepreneurial experience in diverse areas of Information and Communication Technology. His experience covers a wide spectrum of experience in the Delivery Management of large and critical programmes, technology development, product development, business development, system integration and management of research laboratories. He has a PhD in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, an MTech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and a BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kanpur. He was responsible for the establishment of the IIT Bombay–Tata Infotech Research Laboratory in 1997 and was its first head. He retired from the Tata Group in November 2020 and, prior to retirement, served as the Global Head for the Cybersecurity Business Unit of Tata Consultancy Services and was recognized as #4 in the top 25 Cybersecurity Executives of 2020–”The IT Services Report”. He was responsible for security execution in several large Government of India projects like the AWAN project of the Indian Army, Passport Seva Project, MCA-21, security of EVMs and many other important projects.