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.
Even if that’s the case, how is it Crowdstrike’s place to call these other companies out for claiming something similar will never happen to them? Thus far, it had only ever happened to CS.
No, we had Sentinelone take down our company a few months ago. Granted, not a global outage, but it’s something similar. I’m sure that if you went back in news archives, you’d find articles about major Sentinelone outages. I think Crowdstrike is just the biggest one in recent history. It’s certainly not unprecedented.
Even if that’s the case, how is it Crowdstrike’s place to call these other companies out for claiming something similar will never happen to them?
I agree completely, which is why I added that last sentence in an edit. This is a bad look for CrowdStrike, even if I agree with the sentiment.
Thus far, it had only ever happened to CS.
Everybody fucks up now and then. That’s my point. It’s why you shouldn’t trust one company to automatically push security updates to critical production servers without either a testing environment or disaster recovery procedures in place.
I doubt you’ll find any software company, or any company in any industry, that has not fucked up something really important. That’s the nature of commerce. It’s why many security protocols exist in the first place. If everyone could be trusted to do their jobs right 100% of the time, you would only need to worry about malicious attacks which make up only a small fraction of security incidents.
The difference here is that CrowdStrike sold a bunch of clients on the idea that they could be trusted to push security updates to production servers without trsting environments. I doubt they told Delta that they didn’t need DRP or any redundancy, but either way, the failure was amplified by a collective technical debt that corporations have been building into their budget sheets to pad their stock prices.
By all means, switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. Or sue them for the loss of value resulting in their fuckup. Sort that out in the contracts and courts, because that’s not my area. But we should all recognize that the lesson learned is not to switch to another threat prevention software company that won’t fuck up. Such a company does not exist.
If you stub your toe, you don’t start walking on your hands. You move the damn coffee table out of the pathway and watch where you’re walking. The lesson is to invest in your infrastructure, build in redundancy, and protect your critical systems from shit like this.
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.
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.
Classic corporate “leadership”
We didn’t do nuffin shareholders, please pay
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.
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.
“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.
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/
