In July 2024, the world witnessed one of the largest IT outages in history. A faulty update from a major cybersecurity vendor brought down over 8.5 million Windows machines globally, grounding flights, shutting down hospitals, and disrupting businesses across every industry. The economic impact was staggering—estimated at over $10 billion in damages, with some of the world's largest organizations losing millions per hour.
As the former CTO and co-founder of EminentWare (acquired by SolarWinds in 2012), I watched this unfold with a mixture of concern and surprise. Here's what's important to understand: this wasn't about one vendor making a mistake—this could happen to anyone. In fact, the vendor in question has since implemented robust controls and mechanisms that actually enable solutions like Patchblox to provide automated testing and validation.
What truly amazed me was how many organizations went completely dark—entire companies effectively bricked overnight. The critical question became: How could this happen? Wasn't there any internal testing of updates before distributing them to entire fleets? No staged rollouts? No validation environments?
The answer was clear: Despite numerous patch management products in the market, organizations simply didn't have the tools or processes in place to properly validate updates before deployment—regardless of the vendor. They were flying blind, trusting that every update would work perfectly—until one didn't.
This is why we founded Patchblox. Not to build another patch management tool, but to create a platform that actually enables organizations to test, validate, and deploy updates safely—whether they're Microsoft patches, third-party applications, or security updates from any vendor. We work with the controls that modern security platforms provide to add that critical validation layer that was missing.
