Live: Major IT outage affecting banks, airlines, media outlets across the world
www.abc.net.au
There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It’s all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.

Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.

Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We’ll see if that changes over the weekend…

  • jedibob5@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1583·
    6 months ago

    Reading into the updates some more… I’m starting to think this might just destroy CloudStrike as a company altogether. Between the mountain of lawsuits almost certainly incoming and the total destruction of any public trust in the company, I don’t see how they survive this. Just absolutely catastrophic on all fronts.

    • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      382·
      6 months ago

      Agreed, this will probably kill them over the next few years unless they can really magic up something.

      They probably don’t get sued - their contracts will have indemnity clauses against exactly this kind of thing, so unless they seriously misrepresented what their product does, this probably isn’t a contract breach.

      If you are running crowdstrike, it’s probably because you have some regulatory obligations and an auditor to appease - you aren’t going to be able to just turn it off overnight, but I’m sure there are going to be some pretty awkward meetings when it comes to contract renewals in the next year, and I can’t imagine them seeing much growth

      • jedibob5@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        Don’t most indemnity clauses have exceptions for gross negligence? Pushing out an update this destructive without it getting caught by any quality control checks sure seems grossly negligent.

    • ThrowawaySobriquet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      6 months ago

      I think you’re on the nose, here. I laughed at the headline, but the more I read the more I see how fucked they are. Airlines. Industrial plants. Fucking governments. This one is big in a way that will likely get used as a case study.

    • Bell@lemmy.worldEnglish
      56·
      6 months ago

      Don’t we blame MS at least as much? How does MS let an update like this push through their Windows Update system? How does an application update make the whole OS unable to boot? Blue screens on Windows have been around for decades, why don’t we have a better recovery system?

      • sandalbucket@lemmy.worldEnglish
        91·
        6 months ago

        Crowdstrike runs at ring 0, effectively as part of the kernel. Like a device driver. There are no safeguards at that level. Extreme testing and diligence is required, because these are the consequences for getting it wrong. This is entirely on crowdstrike.