The Crowdstrike/Windows outage and the LabLynx LIMS

LabLynx Clients,

One of the largest IT outages that has occurred to date, occurred this morning (July 19).  We hope that you and yours are not unduly impacted by this event.  If this is news to you: Windows Update on many computers that utilize Crowdstrike Falcon were unable to start this morning, resulting in the blue screen of death.

If your computers are impacted, Crowdstrike has sent an email that provides a series of steps you may need to take.  We would like to reiterate Crowdstrike’s comment that this is not a security incident.

We are writing to inform you of LabLynx’s status regarding this event, what we are doing and have done, and that we will continue to actively monitor.

Status

Several LabLynx servers were impacted by this, however, of the four production servers that experienced the issue, all are currently functional and sites operational, having been resolved before most businesses working hours.  Most servers were not impacted.

Cause

We do utilize Crowdstrike on our servers.

What we are doing?

1. We actively monitor for outages, which allowed us to catch this as early as possible.  We will continue to do so.
2. As we host with AWS, we will be watching for any alerts they provide, in the event that they were impacted.
3. We will be proactively comparing what we have installed to versions that have fixes for this from MS and from Crowdstrike, to ensure we do not have systems that are impacted going forward.
4. Updates to the operating system and applications are staged in a test server before they are allowed to be applied to production systems.  Elab LIMS sites on those testing systems are exercised to ensure the underlying updates have not negatively impacted the LIMS software.

Best Regards,

Laurie Mueller
COO | LabLynx, Inc.