Did the recent Crowdstrike outage lead to any changes in your crisis communication plan?

The only changes we had to make were updating some outdated numbers and contact information. These instances were very few and far between. Other than that, our plan worked and served us with a high degree of efficacy.

We were indirectly impacted where some of our non critical services supported by partners (vendors) had severe impact. However, we did not take this lightly and immediately did a lessons learned which included review and improvements of our processes (such as crisis management plan), technology and governance. 

We actually purchased a crisis communication tool, inspired by the adage, "Don't ever let a good crisis go to waste." We absolutely took that advice to heart. I've been with the company for about 12 years, and it seems like we discuss crisis communication every year around hurricane season since we're located on the Gulf Coast. Typically, we get through hurricane season without any major incidents, and then the topic drops off until the next year. However, this time it really hit home. I found myself sitting on my couch, trying to communicate with everyone about what was happening, while simultaneously being on a conference call and sending texts. This was especially challenging when trying to coordinate with the senior executive leadership team and disseminate information to end users. As a result, we signed an agreement for a new crisis communication tool just last Friday.

We were indirectly affected by some of our vendors, but it was a minor event for us, not a major one. Therefore, that specific incident did not lead to any changes in our crisis communication plan.

An interesting statistic to note is that Epic, the EHR vendor used by many leading health systems, including ours, observed a 17% reduction in the number of doctors and nurses having Epic sessions on the day of the event. This shows how significant the impact was across all Epic customers who happened to be using CrowdStrike.