The global IT crash poll results

Poll results breakdown

According to the poll, the most significant impact of the IT crash on organisational health and safety was increased stress among staff, with 42 per cent of respondents indicating this as their primary concern. From a health and safety perspective, mitigating stress in similar disruptions is crucial in safeguarding organisational health and employee wellbeing.

Delays in critical operations were another significant concern, affecting 37 per cent of respondents. For many organisations, the outage disrupted essential functions and processes, which can lead to backlogs of work and extended timelines for project completion and have a ripple effect on client satisfaction and business outcomes.

While less prevalent, compromised protocols were still a notable issue for 13 per cent of respondents. For instance, this disruption could lead to temporary lapses in security and procedural adherence, raising concerns about data integrity and operational continuity. For some organisations handling sensitive information, such breaches could have long-term consequences, emphasising the need for robust contingency plans and resilient IT infrastructures.

The ‘other’ category, represented 8 per cent of responses, highlighting a range of diverse impacts, which can also include those that experienced no impact at all. Some commenters on the poll post revealed minimal disruption – like those from businesses such as farming with paper-based systems. While some reported online attendee numbers were down or online training was affected on MS Teams, others reported their systems were unaffected, leading to a ‘business as usual’ scenario.

How do we mitigate future disruptions?

Experts advise achieving greater resilience through robust planning, and mitigating impacts of future IT outages by implementing backup systems, conducting regular disaster recovery testing, and developing stringent software update protocols (SMC, 2024). Such incidents underscore the health and safety risks that can arise from digital disruptions.

In some cases, IT failures can lead to unsafe working conditions, as employees might be forced to work without critical IT support, potentially compromising their safety protocols.

Communication can break down during outages, which can exacerbate emergency situations, increasing the risk of workplace accidents. Therefore, the poll results highlight the importance of considering IT failures and outages as part of any business contingency planning.

Reflecting on the impact of this global IT crash, what did your organisation learn from it and what changes will be implemented to mitigate future impacts?

References

1. The Observer (2024). The Observer view on the global IT crash: lessons must be learned from CrowdStrike fiasco. July 20th, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/20/the-observer-view-on-the-global-it-crash-lessons-must-be-learned-from-crowdstrike-fiasco
2. Plumber, R. & Gerken, T. (2024) CrowdStrike IT outage: Flight disruption after Microsoft crash — as it happened. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp4wnrxqlewo
3. Reeves, E. (2024) CrowdStrike: IT Outage. House of Commons. 752: debated on Monday 22 July 2024. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2024-07-22/debates/6D419A52-A4F6-4321-BE2C-DD60361FE5BE/CrowdstrikeITOutage
4. SMC (2024). Science Media Centre (SMC) August 2024. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-mass-global-IT-outage