This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
While I don’t totally disagree with you, this has mostly nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with a piece of corporate spyware garbage that some IT Manager decided to install. If tools like that existed for Linux, doing what they do to to the OS, trust me, we would be seeing kernel panics as well.
How is it not a window problem?
The fault seems to be 90/10 CS, MS.
MS allegedly pushed a bad update. Ok, it happens. Crowdstrike’s initial statement seems to be blaming that.
CS software csagent.sys took exception to this and royally shit the bed, disabling the entire computer. I don’t think it should EVER do that, so the weight of blame must lie with them.
The really problematic part is, of course, the need to manually remediate these machines. I’ve just spent the morning of my day off doing just that. Thanks, Crowdstrike.
EDIT: Turns out it was 100% Crowdstrike, and the update was theirs. The initial press release from CS seemed to be blaming Microsoft for an update, but that now looks to be misleading.
Didn’t Crowdstrike have a bad update to Debian systems back in April this year that caused a lot of problems? I don’t think it was a big thing since not as many companies are using Crowdstrike on Debian.
Sounds like the issue here is Crowdstrike and not Windows.
*crowdstrike
I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.
I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.
It’s also a “don’t allow third party proprietary shit into your kernel” issue. If the driver was open source it would actually go through a public code review and the issue would be more likely to get caught. Even if it did slip through people would publically have a fix by now with all the eyes on the code. It also wouldn’t get pushed to everyone simultaneously under the control of a single company, it would get tested and packaged by distributions before making it to end users.
It’s actually a “test things first and have a proper change control process” thing. Doesn’t matter if it’s open source, closed source scummy bullshit or even coded by God: you always test it first before hitting deploy.
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