On the day of the outage, ETR conducted a real-time CrowdStrike flash survey of 100 IT decision makers to capture the initial impact and reaction to the global IT outages caused by the company's update on Microsoft Windows. The full results are available for subscribers on the ETR platform here. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents were from large organizations, including a quarter (25%) from Global 2000 firms. This article provides some key takeaways and customer quotations from the initial survey. ETR plans to run another survey of CrowdStrike customers in the coming weeks to gauge the difference in sentiment and ascertain the remediation and recovery aspects related to this outage. If you want to see these results, you can contact our service team or start your own trial period here.
Key Findings:
• 96% of organizations were affected by system crashes or outages, while 68% experienced somewhat significant to very significant impacts with 6% shutting down nearly all essential operations.
• 56% are very unlikely or somewhat unlikely to replace CrowdStrike with 39% very likely or somewhat likely to replace the Company and 5% certain to replace.
• 55% are reconsidering their reliance on CrowdStrike, while 38% see no need to change how they use the Company.
• Respondents' expressed disappointment in the company's testing and response, urging better QA processes and improved communication.
Although 71% of respondents stated there would be difficulty in trying to replace CrowdStrike in their organization, many also suggested they intended to do so, with 5% saying it was a certainty, 9% saying it was very likely, and 30% suggesting it was somewhat likely. While tempers were high at that time, ETR plans to run another iteration of this survey in the coming weeks to see if the emotions have softened with the passing of time. We also asked if this impact would change people's forward-looking alignment with teh premium security provider, and unfortunately, it did. As seen below, only 38% of the 100 customer organizations polled said that the event would have no impact on their plans with CrowdStrike. A smaller percentage of 7% stated they already had plans to move away from the vendor prior to the outage. The majority, however, said the outage has caused them to reconsider plans to consolidate with the vendor (32%), and 23% stated they were likely to reduce their reliance on CrowdStrike.
As part of the survey, we also allotted the respondents a write-in opportunity to express their reaction to the outage and how they were being impacted. The results were candid.
Select Customer Commentary:
- "Totally unacceptable. Thinking this was a governance/change control rollout mistake. I can't believe it was a testing mistake, as that would be even worse if it made it through testing. This cost my team a lot of sleep, and having to go around and manually touch every device was brutal. Took IT people out of their jobs at some of our plants."
- "Why does CS have such a large blast radius release strategy considering the operation of a global service."
- "Completely unacceptable, there is no excuse for the disruption caused globally. A simple test of the update would have prevented the chaos that was brought to us around the globe."
- "CrowdStrike is a premium EDR solution, and we expect due diligence from CrowdStrike before rolling out major updates."
- "Your message about the crash was late and lacking any sense of regret or otherwise being humble. You have failed to deliver on your mission."
- "The communication has been lax and engineering is not giving good ways to understand the size of the impact and which machines are impacted. Queries show different results, and this is not acceptable."
- "You should be ashamed of your QA testing for them to not uncover such an obvious and significant issue with your updated software."
Remember to stay tuned for the follow-up survey coming in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can contact the ETR Team to discuss this survey or request expert calls with our ITDM community, as well as check out the ETR research platform for yourself.
Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai