CrowdStrike effectively bricked windows, Mac and Linux today.
Windows machines won’t 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.
I wish my Windows work machine wouldn’t 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
You’re a much more honest person than I am. I’d have just claimed mine was BSODing too.
Since it’s affidavit@lemm.ee, it would be illegal to be dishonest.
I’ll see myself out.
Imagine this happening during open heart surgery and all the monitors go blue!
Good lord I would hope critical surgical computers like that aren’t networked externally… Somehow I’m guessing I’m wrong.
Fear not, that’s why we deploy extra security software to these critical systems. It’s called Crowdsource or something.
Critical surgery computers may also be running under Windows LTSC, so they might not get the CrowdStrike patch. Maybe…
Edit: So the issue is apparently caused by CrowdStrike. So, unless the surgery computers also use CrowdStrike then it would be fine. Unless, of course, if they use CrowdStrike on surgery computers…
I’d heard some hospitals were affected. They cancelled appointments and non-critical surgeries.
I’m guessing it was mostly their “behind the desk” computers that got affected, not the computers used to control the important stuff. The computers in patients’ rooms may have been affected as well, but (at least in the US) those are usually just used to record information about medicine given and other details about the patient, nothing critical that can’t be done manually.
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)
There were no test rings for this one and it wasn’t a user controlled update. It was pushed by CS in a way that couldn’t be intercepted/tested/vetted by the consumer unless your device either doesn’t have CS installed or isn’t on an external network… or I suppose you could block CS connections at the firewall. 🤷♂️
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.
Good News! Unless something has changed since I worked in healthcare IT, those systems are far too old to be impacted!
I’m half-joking. I don’t know what that kind of equipment runs, but I would guess something embedded. The nuke-med stuff was mostly linux and various lab analyzers were also something embedded though they interface with all sorts of things (which can very well be windows). Pharmaceutical dispensers ran various linux-like OS’s (though I couldn’t even tell you the names anymore). Some medical records stuff was also proprietary, but Windows was replacing most of it near the end of my time.
One place we had ran their keycard system all on a windows 3.1 box still. I don’t doubt some modern systems also are running on Windows which has interesting implications for getting into/out of places.
That said, a lot of that stuff doesn’t touch the outside internet at all unless someone has done something horribly wrong. Medical records systems often do, though (including for billing and insurance stuff).
I was just watching this show called Connections and the first episode was about a power blackout and it showed how the lights went out during a birth.
Great show it went on about what do you do if the power stays off permanently and how we aren’t well prepared for that and how to start a civilization after you kill some farmers and steal their land but non of their tools work without power either and if you know how to mount an old-school plow to oxen
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.
Yeah but testing costs money and CEO needs new private island, his old one is too small.
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
Sure, this time it only affected Windows computers, but Crowdstrike has also broken Linux installs this year:
So, do all windows machines use this, or do you have to add this software?
It’s separate software; CrowdStrike is independent from Microsoft and it isn’t a default component of Windows.
It seems to be an enterprise product, meaning normal users might not have been affected. I wouldn’t personnaly be able to confirm since I usually have 1-2 month uptime on my windows machine.
This is very popular software.
if that’s a “good” argument for you, then i’ve already heared that, and it nearly never really fits. here is another one for you that is an argument as generic as yours: “maybe try eating poo, trillions of flies cannot be wrong, poo is VERY popular food, much more popular than any human food !!! (as in mass per day as well as in its number of consumers)”
I wasn’t making a case for adopting this software. Just pointing out that it is widely used, which is why it had such a wide effect.
I think you’ll find most corporations would jump off a bridge if they saw their competitors jump.
cloudstrike crowdstrike should be sued into hell
well maybe letting them pay compensation to all(!) victims (not just their customers) for all losses including lost time already would solve that problem.
that would leave the decades-long unsolved problem of microsoft not beeing held liable for their buggy products (which is the reason for all security-products-as-a-workaround-to-compensate-that-crappy-os companies existance) open.
why not in general hold companies liable for the damage they cause so they CAN develop beeing more cautious with what they do? i mean not ONLY cs should be sued to hell, but ALL of them should be sued until they are reasonable cautious with all possible damages they can cause (and already did in the past)
It’s not Microsoft’s fault a third party company wrote a kernel module that crashes the OS.
Unlike the mobile world where apps are severely limited and sandboxed, the desktop is completely the opposite. Microsoft has tried many times to limit what programs can do, but encountered a lot of resistance and ultimately had to let it go.
Windows requires that antuviruses run at kernel level, programs which are notoriously buggy and harmful. It is a design flaw to require users to implement mandatory security features in this way. (it is literally not possible to run windows 10 or 11 without an antivirus) Similar security programs on Linux do not run at kernel level, nor should they.
Furthermore, every copy of Windows since Windows 7 requires that kernel modules are signed by Microsoft themselves. Microsoft personally signed off on this code that crashed millions of computers.
If someone hands a toddler a gun and they shoot someone, who’s fault is it?
