CrowdStrike touts product resilience a year after global outages

What they're saying: "We're a stronger company today than we were a year ago," CEO George Kurtz wrote on LinkedIn. "The work continues. The mission endures. And we're moving forward: stronger, smarter, and even more committed than ever."

Flashback: On July 19 last year, CrowdStrike pushed a defective update to its software that crashed millions of Windows systems around the world and left them with the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death."

• Thousands of flights were canceled. Health care systems canceled outpatient operations. Schools canceled classes, and government agencies couldn't conduct basic services.

Zoom in: In a blog post yesterday, CrowdStrike president Mike Sentonas wrote that the company spent the last year focused on making its platform more resilient to operational issues like the July 19 outage.

• Many of the improvements CrowdStrike made to its products rely on predicting potential problems — rather than responding to incidents once they happen.
• "It's about creating intelligence that responds dynamically to changing conditions, diverse environments, and evolving threats," Sentonas wrote.

• Customers now have increased control over what updates and configurations they deploy and when they run them.

What's next: Sentonas added that the company is planning to hire a new chief resilience officer to oversee future improvements to this work.

• "This work isn't finished and never will be," he said. "Resilience isn't a milestone — it's a discipline that requires continuous commitment and evolution."

Go deeper: Fortune 500 lost an estimated $5.4B in CrowdStrike outage