I would be interested to know what the distribution of release times for these "channel files" is like. Dropping them at 8pm Eastern time is in line with some

I would be interested to know what the distribution of release times for these "channel files" is like. Dropping them at 8pm Eastern time is in line with some companies' idea of well-timed system maintenance windows, whereas others prefer to do things during the workday so that if they need all hands on deck, they can get them more easily. The latter works better with organizations that release often and have reasonable surety that their updates are not going to cause disruption -- it becomes a normal part of the day, most commonly it causes no noticeable disruption at all, and thus it makes sense to not have to have eng / ops working late hours for the release. This surety can come from different ways, but the one I've seen is having a very methodical rollout with at least a smoke-test (affecting a very small subset of "production", not internal or lab machines, so in CRWD's case it would be customers' machines), and then rolling out to a random %age of machines starting with 1%, and depending on your level of confidence, some schedule that gets you to 100% before the end of business for your easternmost co-workers. Some additional things to gain confidence can include a 1% rollout to a set of machines that is picked to ideally provide exposure to every type of machine in the fleet, and 100% rollout to customers who have agreed to be at the cutting edge (how you get them to accept that risk is an exercise for the reader, but maybe cut them a deal like 30% off their license). The reason I'm curious about the distribution of channel file drops, for the case of Crowdstrike, is that if it's an atypically-timed release, that could indicate that it's a response to whatever caused the dip in traffic on the 16th mentioned in the Bitsight article. Edit: From what I understand, Crowdstrike does have at least some segmentation of releases for the kernel extension, but it appears the configuration file / channel file updates seem to be "Oh well, fire ze missiles".