A renowned Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and cloud infrastructure expert, Taiwo Akinbolaji, has stated that the recent CrowdStrike outage, which disrupted services across multiple industries, could have been prevented with stronger resilience strategies.
In a recent interview, Akinbolaji described the incident as a clear example of how a critical update failure could escalate into a global disruption.
According to him, as businesses increasingly depend on third-party platforms for cybersecurity and infrastructure management, a single failure can have widespread consequences.
“This incident was a perfect storm, a critical update gone wrong, cascading into widespread service interruptions. It exposed not just vulnerabilities in endpoint security but also weaknesses in how cloud infrastructure is architected. True resilience isn’t just about incident response; it’s about preventing disruptions before they occur.”
Akinbolaji emphasised the need for a multi-layered approach to cloud resilience, outlining three key principles: redundancy, observability, and automation.
He explained that redundancy, particularly through multi-region deployments, is essential for mitigating cloud region outages.
“Cloud-native platforms must adopt geographic redundancy,” he said, adding that diversifying operating systems and endpoint security platforms would prevent platform-specific failures from having a widespread impact.
On observability, he stressed the importance of real-time system monitoring. “Observability platforms like Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog are invaluable. They provide real-time visibility into system health, allowing teams to detect anomalies before they escalate.”
He also noted that proactive testing, including canary deployments and continuous health checks, can help identify vulnerabilities early.
Akinbolaji pointed to automation as a critical component of resilience, particularly in rolling back faulty updates.
“During the CrowdStrike outage, the lack of automated rollback mechanisms prolonged downtime for many. Automated pipelines ensure that failed updates can be swiftly reversed.”
Beyond these principles, he advised organisations to implement endpoint segmentation and isolation to limit the impact of failures.
“If critical systems were isolated from non-essential systems, it would reduce the blast radius of any single failure.”
He also recommended automated rollback controls for endpoint security agents, which, he said, “could have significantly reduced downtime during the CrowdStrike outage.”
Akinbolaji further stressed the importance of cross-functional collaboration.
“The DevSecOps approach integrating security into DevOps workflows ensures resilience extends to threat detection and incident response. Joint exercises and shared dashboards are essential for breaking down silos.”
Having contributed to resilience strategies across high-risk industries, he believes the future of cloud resilience lies in AI-driven anomaly detection and self-healing infrastructure.
“The CrowdStrike outage was a wake-up call. It highlighted the need for systems that don’t just react to failures but actively prevent them.”
However, as businesses continue to rely on cloud platforms, he noted that stronger resilience measures will be crucial in preventing widespread service disruptions.
“Resilience is not a destination, it’s a journey. As engineers, our responsibility is to ensure that when disruptions happen and they will, they don’t bring entire systems down with them. Prevention is always better than cure.”
To say that Akinbolaji’s expertise and commitment to cloud resilience are helping to create a more secure and dependable digital landscape is an understatement. As businesses become more reliant on cloud platforms, professionals like him play a crucial role in strengthening IT infrastructure against disruptions. With industry leaders like Akinbolaji leading the charge, there is hope that major outages, such as the CrowdStrike incident, will become increasingly rare if not entirely preventable.
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