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CrowdStrike effectively bricked windows, Mac and Linux today.
Windows machines wonβt boot, and Mac and Linux work is abandoned because all their users are on twitter making memes.
Incredible work.
Come on, it was right in their name. CrowdStrike. They were threatening us all this time.
We formed a crowd, then BAM, they striked.
We should have seen this coming!!!
I wish my Windows work machine wouldnβt boot. Everything worked fine for us. :-(
Could be worse. I was the only member of my entire team who didn't get stuck in a boot loop, meaning I had to do their work as well as my own... Can't even blame being on Linux as my work computer is Windows 11, I got 'lucky'; I just got a couple of BSODs and the system restarted just fine.
Funny, mine did a couple BSODs then restarted just fine, at first. Then a fist shaped hole appeared in the monitor and it wouldn't turn on again.
Weird bug.
Lol why is it always the monitor to get beat. It only has one job, just to show you what the computer is outputting lol
why is it always the monitor to get beat
Because it's within arm's reach and the developers aren't.
You're a much more honest person than I am. I'd have just claimed mine was BSODing too.
As a career QA, i just do not understand how this got through? Do they not use their own software? Do they not have a UAT program?
Heads will roll for this
Imagine this happening during open heart surgery and all the monitors go blue!
Anecdotal, but my spouse was in surgery during the outage and it went fine, so I imagine they take precautions (like probably having a test machine for updates before they install anything on the real one, maybe)
Depending on the machine, I guess it's likely that those aren't using Windoofs at all. I would be surprised if there were devices in use during surgery who run on that.
Any critical devices should be airgapped while in service.
They make software for both of them also though, IMO they're at fault for sure but so should be Microsoft for making a trash operating system.
Not saying Windows isn't trash, but considering what CrowdStrike's software is, they could have bricked Mac or Linux just as hard. The CrowdStrike agent has pretty broad access to modify and block execution of system files. Nuke a few of the wrong files, and any OS is going to grind to a halt.
~~cloudstrike~~ crowdstrike should be sued into hell
Better rebrand to Clownstrife I guess.
Is there a good eli5 on what crowdstrike is, why it is so massively used, why it seems to be so heavily associated with Microsoft and what the hell happened?
Gonna try my best here:
Crowdstrike is an anti-virus program that everyone in the corporate world uses for their windows machines. They released a update that made the program fail badly enough that windows crashes. When it crashes like this, it tries to restart in case it fixes the issue, but here it doesn't, and computers get stuck in a loop of restarting.
Because anti-virus programs are there to prevent bad things from happening, you can't just automatically disable the program when it crashes. This means a lot of computers cannot start properly, which means you also cannot tell the computers to fix the problem remotely like you usually would.
The end result is a bunch of low level techs are spending their weekends manually going to each computer individually, and swapping out the bad update file so the computer can boot. It's a massive failure on crowdstrikes part, and a good reason you shouldn't outsource all your IT like people have been doing.
It's also a strong indicator that companies are not doing enough to protect their own infrastructure. Production servers shouldn't have third party software that auto-updates without going through a test environment. It's one thing to push emergency updates if there is a timely concern or vulnerability, but routine maintenance should go through testing before being promoted to prod.
It's because this got pushed as a virus definition update and not a client update bypassing even customer staging rules that should prevent issues like this. Makes it a little more understandable because you'd want to be protected against current threats. But, yeah should still hit testing first if possible.
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company that makes security software for Windows. It apparently operates at the kernel-level, so it's running in the critical path of the OS. So if their software crashes, it takes Windows down with it.
This is very popular software. Many large entities including fortune 500 companies, transport authorities, hospitals etc. use this software.
They pushed a bad update which caused their software to crash, which took Windows down with it on an extremely large number of machines worldwide.
Hilariously bad.
Honestly it is kind of hilarious, with how many people I have had make fun of me for using Linux, and now here I am laughing from my Linux desktop lol
Oh so its not windows only
The joke is Mac and Linux users, who aren't actually effected, are incapacitated due to being busy gloating on social media.