
Prakash Kota, chief information officer at business software firm Autodesk, was fortunate enough to experience an uneventful flight home on Thursday evening to the San Francisco Bay Area after attending a leadership team meeting in Montreal.
By Friday morning, Kota and others awoke to the largest IT outage in history. A software update pushed out by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused millions of Windows-based computer systems to crash, upending air travel, banking, retail transactions, hospitals, and railways across the globe. Many CIOs are still dealing with the aftermath.