Basically they fucked up and don’t like the criticism from other companies/ customers.
It’s not really criticism, it’s competitors claiming they will never fuck up.
Like, if you found mouse in your hamburger at McDonald’s, that’s a massive fuckup. If Burger King then started saying “you’ll never find anything gross in Burger King food!” that would be both crass opportunism and patently false.
It’s reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it’s not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.
But also Microsoft fucked up. And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too. Delta shut down, cancelling 4,600 flights. American Airlines cancelled 43 flights, 10 of which would have been cancelled even without the outage.
Like, imagine if some diners at McDonald’s connected their mouths to a chute that delivers pre-chewed food sight-unseen into their gullets, and then got mad when they fell ill from eating a mouse. Don’t do that, not at any restaurant.
All that said, if you fuck up, you don’t get to complain about your competitors being crass opportunists.
you’ll never find anything gross in Burger King food!
Number fifteen…
That’s the first thing I heard in my head lmao
Resiliency and security have a lot of layers. The crowd strike bungle was very bad but more than anything it shined a bright spot light on the fact that certain organizations IT orgs are just a house of cards waiting to get blown away.
I’m looking at Delta in particular. Airlines are a critical transportation service and to have issues with one software vendor bring your entire company screeching to a halt is nothing short of embarrassing.
If I were on the board, my first question would be, “where’s our DRP and why was this situation not accounted for?”
House of cards is exactly right. At every IT job I’ve worked, the bosses want to check the DRP box as long as it costs as close to zero dollars as possible, and a day or two of 1-2 people writing it up. I do my best to cover my own ass, and regularly do actual restores, limit potential blast radii, and so on. But at a high level, bosses don’t give AF about defense, they are always on offense (i.e. make more money faster).
In what way did Microsoft fuck up? They don’t control Crowdstrike updates. Short of the OS files being immutable it seems unlikely they can stop things like this.
Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.
CrowdStrike pushed an errant update. Microsoft allowed a single errant update to cause an unrecoverable boot loop. CrowdStrike is the market leader in their sector and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but Microsoft is older than the internet and creates hundreds of billions of dollars. CrowdStrike was the primary cause, but Microsoft enabled the meltdown.
Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.
They have to give that access by EU ruling:
Microsoft software licensing expert Rich Gibbons said: “Microsoft has received some criticism for the fact that a third party was able to affect Windows at such a deep technical level. It’s interesting that Microsoft has pointed out the fact this stems from a 2009 EU anti-competition ruling that means Microsoft must give other security companies the same access to the Windows kernel as they have themselves.”
Well there’s a provocative anecdote if I’ve ever seen one. Well done.
It’s not really criticism, it’s competitors claiming they will never fuck up.
Not in all cases [podcast warning], sometimes it’s just them pointing out they’re doing silly things like how they test every update and don’t let it out the door with <98% positive returns or having actual deployment rings instead of of yeeting an update to millions systems in less than an hour.
It’s reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it’s not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.
Clownstrike deserves every bit of shit they’re getting, and it amazes me that people are buying the bullshit they’re selling. They had no real testing or quality control in place, because if that update had touched test windows boxes it would have tipped them over and they’d have actually known about it ahead of time. Fucking up is fine, we all do it. But when your core practices are that slap dash, bitching about criticism just brings more attention to how badly your processes are designed.
But also Microsoft fucked up.
How did Microsoft fuck up? Giving a security vender kernel access? Like they’re obligated to from previous lawsuits?
And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too
Customers can’t test clownstrike updates ahead of time or in a nonprod environment, because clownstrike knows best lol.
Redundancy is not relevant here because what company is going to use different IDR products for primary and secondary tech stacks?
Backups are also not relevant (mostly) because it’s quicker to remediate the problem than restore from backup (unless you had super regular DR snaps and enough resolution to roll back from before the problem.
IMO, clownstrike is the issue, and customers have only the slightest blame for using clownstrike and for not spending extra money on a second IDR on redundant stacks.
Yeah, it was an international fuck up. You’re going to get heat, and it’s 100 percent deserved. Go cry in a corner and fuck off into oblivion.
“Our industry is built on trust,” Sentonas said
And instead of following that statement with an apology to all the companies and people they royally fucked in the ass with their shitty business practices, they instead whined about other people pointing out what a massive, colossal, and completely preventable fuckup this was.
Good going sealing my resolve to never use crowdstrike.
Hey, they gave some people an Uber Eats coupon
A $10 UberEats voucher that most couldn’t use
When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/
So, fraud on to of everything else…? If they do some light treason, it’s a hat trick!
They whine about this now, after they removed their “shady commentary” towards Microsoft from their website
Reference: https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1816823026291270136
Cry me a half billion dollar river, maybe we can use that money to fix all the damages it did.
No, its good. They sent out $10 gift cards.
Awww, let’s all feel bad for the rich, shitty company that has shitty quality control.
Hey, they’re trying their hardest. It’s hard because they had the joke build stored right next to the actual build so when they went to push it they clicked the wrong one.
Crowdstrike didn’t just fuck up, they killed people. I personally had to postpone a blood test, but mine wasn’t critical and I’m alive to complain. Not everyone is.
CrowdStrike customers ‘unhappy’ with CrowdStrike
Lol perfect
Stahp, you meany!
Somebody should call them a wambulance since their fee-fees got hurt.
I do believe the number is still nine-wah-wah
Sorry but some fields have no margin for error, just take the L and shut up.
Youre a verb now, guys. That’s what happens when you fuck up that badly. Deal with it <3
Nothing shady about that commentary after seeing how they screwed up. I couldn’t believe how amateur hour the cause of the crash was (the program not validating definition file contents, which spectacularly failed when fed a file consisting only of zeroes). They should rename themselves to ClownTrike.
That wasn’t what was in the file, it was actual stuff. I saved a copy of it.
What happened was the file directed their craptastic snake oil software, which did absolutely no sanity checking first, to access memory it wasn’t actually given which predictably resulted in it crashing, and since its dick was way up the kernels butt at the time they both went down together.
I’ve been calling them ClownStrike because they’re clowns and their incompetence struck everyone else hard.
Yup a null pointer reference for a boot time driver. Which Microsoft never should’ve signed and should revoke. But ya know… Money
Ah, thanks for the clarification on the details. Either way it boggles my mind that they didn’t have checks in place.
I wonder if they’ll end up doing a rename / rebrand if “ClownStrike” continues to haunt them (as it should).
If they do, I’m sure the new name will be some focus tested aberration they pay way too much for.
And their customers are unhappy with the catastrophic service failure. Cry me a river.
