Incident Management and the Crowdstrike Event with Liam Westley

About Show #1014

On July 19, 2024, a misconfigured file sent as part of an update to the Falcon Sensor suite by CrowdStrike caused service outages worldwide. Liam Westley talks about his experiences executing the incident management plan at his company that day—even though his company did not use the software! Liam talks about dealing with the regulatory requirements of a finance company as part of incident planning, and how the software and services supply chain can lead to outages because those companies are affected. A great story about the day of the incident and the improvements in planning and resiliency that followed!

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Recorded October 29, 2025

Liam Westley was most recently Head of Engineering at FreemarketFX, a fintech startup specializing in foreign currency trading, with a cloud native platform in Azure, helping expand a single development and QA team from eight people, to five teams, while obtaining an Ireland banking licence and implementing full Azure regional redundancy. Previous to FreemarketFX, Liam worked at Huddle helping the mobile and desktop teams create apps to play nicely with microservices. At Criteria MX, a digital media startup and he has worked as a consultant specialising in software for Broadcast Television. His Niagara SMS moderation system was used by QVC UK for eight years to display SMS messages from viewers, live, on screen. Liam is also responsible for the ticketing system for Hat Trick Productions which provides e-tickets to shows such as Have I Got News For You and Room 101. Liam has worked for chellomedia, GMTV, BSkyB, SmashedAtom and Original Thinking Group. In his time he created the first in house weather system for Sky News using Visual Basic 1.0, acted as architect for two general election systems, project managed the launch of the GMTV web site, was key to delivering the first interactive television chat service in the UK for BSkyB and helped launch the first live shopping channel in the Netherlands.

About Show #1014

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