Canaries in coal mines and normal accidents: The CrowdStrike outage and its lessons for critical infrastructure

The service outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike software update in July 2024 triggered a widespread disruption in services and activities worldwide, ranging from airline operations, to credit card transaction processing, emergency and cellular telephone operations, and technical issues for more than 8 million Microsoft Windows users. The outage was not the result of a deliberate attempt to disrupt systems, but rather of what Charles Perrow has termed a “normal accident.” This article explores the implications of technological complexity for critical infrastructure and offers ideas for a research agenda to better understand resilience in tightly coupled, critical infrastructure systems.