Today marks a particularly challenging day for incident responders across the globe. As many of you may have noticed, a recent update from CrowdStrike has triggered widespread disruptions, causing chaos in various sectors. The ripple effects have been far-reaching and severe: While the technical specifics of the issue might not be the focus here—and indeed, there are experts better suited to dissect the cause—what's crucial is understanding the impact on those who manage such crises.

Shubham Srivastava from our team had the pleasure of meeting Andreas Grabner at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe earlier this year. Andreas wears many hats in his daily work, primarily serving as a DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, where he has dedicated over 16 years to shape the Observability solutions we see today. He is also a Developer Advocate at Keptn – helping teams automate and orchestrate their deployments end-to-end and plays an active role as an Ambassador in the CNCF community.

While individual blue screen errors are frustrating, the recent global system crashes caused by a CrowdStrike update incompatible with Microsoft Windows have wreaked havoc across entire industries since early Friday morning. Companies ranging from the airlines, media, and banking industries have been facing significant disruptions, with thousands of customer-facing devices experiencing blue screens and causing widespread travel delays and chaos.

Given recent global events, UptimeRobot is experiencing an increased number of downtime notifications. We are currently sending out five times more notifications than usual due to a widespread power outage impacting several critical services worldwide. Here’s a brief overview of the situation and how it affects our monitoring services.

On July 18, 2024 at 6:38 pm ET, Vantage DX, Martello’s Microsoft 365 and Teams performance management solution, started to see indicators of a likely Microsoft outage impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. Almost an hour later at 7:41 pm ET Microsoft issued a statement on X.

In a recent unexpected turn of events, a faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update led to widespread outages, crashing Windows systems globally. The repercussions were felt across various sectors, including airports, TV stations, hospitals, and even emergency services in the U.S. and Canada. The glitch, affecting both Windows workstations and servers, resulted in massive outages, bringing entire companies to a standstill and crashing fleets of hundreds of thousands of computers.

For the rest of the world, these are just two synonyms. But in ITIL, the main IT service management framework, the distinction is crucial. Let’s find out.

Our On-call product has been in the wild for a few months now, and in this post I want to talk about building a time-sensitive system and what we did to handle some of the challenges. I’ll cover what our scheduler is responsible for, the basics of working with time, and talk a bit about how we tested our system.

Service operations (ServiceOps) is a technology-enabled approach that unifies IT operations and IT service (ITSM) teams and facilitates frictionless collaboration for more effective incident management. ServiceOps combines people, processes, and technology to improve visibility, workflows, and collaboration between otherwise siloed departments. Organizations of all sizes and industries worldwide have adopted ServiceOps.

In a previous post, we discussed initiating your AIOps journey. Now, we’re exploring best practices for progressing through each phase of the maturity journey. In these posts, we’ll focus on how to get started, proven techniques, key participants, and how to measure success.