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This was my first thought too. I'm not that familiar with the space, but I would think for something this sensitive the rollout would be staggered at least instead of what looks like globally all at the same time.

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This is the bit I am still trying to understand. On CrowdStrike you can define how many updates a host is behind. I.e. n (latest), n-1 (one behind) or n-2 etc. This update was applied to a 'latest' policy hosts and the n-2 hosts. To me it appears that there was more to this than just a corrupt update, otherwise how was this policy ignored? Unless it doesn't separate the update as deeply and maybe just a small policy aspect, which would also be very concerning.

I guess we won't really know until they release the post mortem...

Yeah, my guess is that they roll out the updates to every client at the same time, and then have the client implement the n-1/2/whatever part locally. That worked great-ish until they pushed a corrupt (empty) update file which crashed the client when it tried to interpret the contents... Not ideal, and obviously there isn't enough internal testing before sending stuff out to actual clients.

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