AI-driven complexity, holiday absences and invisible change are increasing the risk of costly IT disruption, says Cloudhouse

Two years on from CrowdStrike’s incident, Cloudhouse launches an Outage Stress Test, as AI and summer absences create the perfect conditions for major outages

Two years after the CrowdStrike outage brought businesses, airports and public services around the world to a standstill, Cloudhouse is warning that organisations may be more vulnerable today than they were in 2024.

As enterprises race to adopt AI, automate workflows and deploy new cloud services, thousands of small changes are occurring every day across increasingly complex technology estates. Individually, these changes appear harmless, but collectively, they can create significant operational risk.

Cloudhouse calls this phenomenon ‘invisible change’ – the accumulation of system updates, software integrations, AI workflows, infrastructure modifications and configuration drift that often go unnoticed until something breaks. To help enterprises recognise their potential risks and weak spots it has launched an Outage Stress Test – 20 questions to test an organisation’s vulnerability as it enters the holiday season.  

The assessment will help organisations identify areas of configuration drift, hidden dependencies across systems, unauthorised or undocumented changes. It also highlights single points of failure, vulnerabilities created by AI-driven complexity and operational risks that could worsen during periods of reduced IT coverage. 

With IT teams operating at reduced capacity and key specialists taking annual leave, organisations are left more exposed to outages that take longer to identify, investigate and resolve.

Jon Dedman, Director at Cloudhouse, commented: “Many IT leaders have always been reluctant to deploy significant changes before the weekend – the ‘Friday Fear’ or ‘Read-Only-Friday’ phenomenon – for fear of triggering a business-critical incident that destroys customer and employee goodwill and results in entire weekends spent firefighting. Yet this is precisely when the Crowdstrike outage occurred, caused by invisible and automated change.”

Cloudhouse says organisations should also give themselves permission to slow down during summer months rather than continuing transformation programmes at full speed. 

“Summer is not the time to accelerate every project simultaneously. Your team knows when you’re out of office but AI doesn’t. Technology will continue changing whether people are there to oversee it or not. Service disruption, customer dissatisfaction, reputational damage, employee burnout and emergency remediation costs can quickly escalate from what initially appears to be a minor technical issue.”

Click here to take the Outage Stress Test and understand more about invisible change in your IT estate.