Widespread technology outage disrupts flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world

Did Microsoft test the update before they released it?

I have always loathed Microsoft. Their products always seem so crappy and unintuitive, from operating systems to hotmail, from skype to word and excel, yet they are often unavoidable.

MoonrakerToday 05:23 pm JST

I have always loathed Microsoft. Their products always seem so crappy and unintuitive, from operating systems to hotmail, from skype to word and excel, yet they are often unavoidable.

Apple with its jail made cool strikes you as better?

People using Linux today smiling in the back of the room.

News channels here in Australia are running on skeleton crews. According to ABC Australia airlines over the world are the most affected by this outage. Flights are being cancelled. It happens in a Friday afternoon here. Those looking forward to a weekend get away really cannot believe their luck.

Apple with its jail made cool strikes you as better?

Nope. Is everything a binary these days? There are other alternatives for email, video calls, operating systems, etc. but I always get the feeling that IT in general, and its implementers, has gone astray and is even becoming a bane of life. How much time do we spend putting stuff right because it doesn't work properly or, like in this story, because it doesn't work properly.

It's CrowdStrike, a 3rd-party cybersecurity software company based in Texas, USA

https://www.techradar.com/news/live/windows-outage-july-2024-live

CrowdStrike - the biggest cybersecurity firm you've never heard of. One that like many operates in the shadows and is one of the most important cogs in the supply chain that links some of the biggest companies in the world. 

It is essentially the watchdog and protector of websites and web services. Its popularity propelled it to mighty heights as it briefly surpassed a market capitalization of $100 billion just a few days ago.

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company, which was founded in 2011, boasts nearly 8,000 workers – and will be a familiar sight to fans of Formula 1, having sponsored the Mercedes F1 team for several seasons, its logo portrayed clearly on the car's front wing as well as the driver suits.

According to Toby Murray, associate professor at The University of Melbourne, Australia, the outage has been specifically linked to Crowdstrike's Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform, Falcon.

Falcon is essentially a high-privilege piece of software designed to monitor and detect system intrusions – in other words, cyberattacks and malware – and then take action to respond to them. It's an oversimplification to just call Falcon (or any EDR platform) an antivirus program, but at the end of the day, it is designed to help keep businesses' computer systems safe from digital threats.

Because of this, though, Falcon has a lot of access to control elements of the system it's installed on. For example, it can shut off communications from a PC if it detects malware that is actively transmitting data to an external source. With that sort of control over the computers it's installed on – and Falcon is installed on a very large number of business systems – it makes sense that a Falcon malfunction could cause this sort of widespread outage.

Caused by a faulty file via a CrowdStrike update and the temporary fix:

Fortunately, CrowdStrike has since announced at 2:30 a.m. ET that it has identified the update causing the issue and rolled it back. The company also offered a workaround for anyone having problems:

1.) "Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment

2.) "Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory

3.) "Locate the file matching 'C-0000029*.sys', and delete it.

4.) "Boot the host normally."

Every cloud outage has a silver lining

On the bright side, it seems like corporate America is loving this. After all, what better day for a mass Blue Screen of Death attack than a Friday? The outage has been met with tangible glee by thousands of office workers across social media – although some have been left bemoaning the fact that their employer doesn't use Crowdstrike, and they're still going to have to work today.

Imagine how empty and miserable a wage slave's life would have to be to experience glee at a software outage that gives them one day's respite from their pitiful existence. It's a depressing spectacle.

The issue is with CrowdStrike not Microsoft, Microsoft operating systems with CrowdStrike are impacted, the headline and the article are outright fake.

People using Linux today smiling in the back of the room.

Likely the business applications used by these companies don't have Linux versions (most likely a Windows version only), so they can't be using Linux computers to run these business applications

A few years ago I wiped all MS products off my computer and increased stability and recovered a lot of hard drive space as a result. Everything they touch turns to crap. They messed up Skype and Wunderlist. Word, up to version 5.1 was fast, nice, stable and tight. Now, it's horrible, neither one thing nor the other, far too complicated for a word processor.

This is just a taste of our future, one glitch and our world could come to a stand still.

Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Microsoft dominated the world and will continue to do if we let them, governments should be working on supporting alternatives and backups so we don't get crippled when one goes down.

The four horsemen 2.0: War, famine, death and Windows updates.

I endlessly post on tech forums the need to have a Plan B so that companies can smoothly switch to manual operations when (not 'if') their tech falls over.

Don't digitise stuff for the sake of it - use paper if it is cheaper and works better. Use less and simpler tech. Airgap infrastructure and internal systems, with two systems on each desk. Use distributed systems to erase honeypots of data. Train your staff.

Tech is too complex and tech skills too thinly spread to maintain resilience. This will keep happening. The only variable is the extent of the damage, which depends upon how high up the food chain the problem is.

Tech is inherently less resilient, so run with simpler, hybrid (paper/digital) operations, and have a manual plan B that you rehearse like a fire drill.

For posters who claimed never to need cash discover on these days cash is God.

I haven’t used Windows since the 95 version.

Fax machines were used today. Analog tech.

a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts

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The privately-owned IndiGo airlines told the passengers on X that the Microsoft outage on Friday impacted airline operations in India, inconveniencing thousands of passengers.

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Windows update defect strikes again.

I have my windows update delay set to a week to avoid possible problems.

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passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled.

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A major problem using online and self-service boths.

Without a hard copy/ ticket you are going no where.

It wasn't a "Windows update". It was a CrowdStrike "Update on Windows". CrowdStrike shares crash.

This is not a Windows update issue - it's a CrowdStrike update issue

If ya guys aren't running hundreds or thousands of business PCs, ya probably won't be using CrowdStrike, so this won't be an issue for ya

The fix is to manually trigger a safe boot........... That sound ya hear is every IT department in the world crying in unison. Yes, the IT workers are not happy that they have to go to and in front of each computer, lol

The computers were doing the right thing by updating. Some businesses are telling their employees just to use another computer instead of waiting, while they leave their PCs for the IT workers to fix

To all the IT workers working overtime tonight, we salute ya

This is just a taste of our future, one glitch and our world could come to a stand still.

Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Microsoft dominated the world and will continue to do if we let them, governments should be working on supporting alternatives and backups so we don't get crippled when one goes down.

Sounds beautiful when ya type it out but not practical. Mostly impossible for many businesses and corporations. Ya can't sync on prem AD to a Mac; same with Linux. These systems don't "talk together" as beautifully as people want to think, not really possible. Redundancy costs thousands and thousands of dollars, infrastructure and many other things.

Easy to say, virtually impossible to do, crazy expensive, so much training, etc. Not saying it’s a bad idea, just saying that redundancy is not practical for most companies.

lostrune2

This is not a Windows update issue - it's a CrowdStrike update issue

If ya guys aren't running hundreds or thousands of business PCs, ya probably won't be using CrowdStrike, so this won't be an issue for ya

It's an issue when you can't buy food. Check in a flight. Have an operation. Numerous others.

crowdstrike should hire 15-year olds.

they know to test updates in different os versions before releasing them.

Peter NeilToday 01:11 am JST

crowdstrike should hire 15-year olds.

they know to test updates in different os versions before releasing them.

Do you honestly believe that, and that they wouldn't just copy and paste something from ChatGPT?

Wides Microsoft outage leaves China largely untouched. China’s tech self-sufficiency pays off.

quercetumToday 01:57 am JST

Wides Microsoft outage leaves China largely untouched. China’s tech self-sufficiency pays off.

China is an originator of hacking and viruses along with their fellow countries so they have little to fear I guess.

The CPC is just smart. You don’t fear if you can use your brains. You can also tell that about a person by what they post. Airy empty posts shows an empty stomach or cerebrum with insufficient input.

China orders government agencies and state firms to dump foreign pc’s back in May, 2022 (Bloomberg)

China bans government computers from using Intel and SMD chips March2024 (Asia Financial)

Microsoft outage leaves China unscathed July 2024. That’s perspicacity.

quercetumToday 03:34 am JST

I'll choose not to live in a police state without access to the outside internet and deal with the occasional IT disruption. Don't have to have a cerebrum to make that determination.

Microsoft outage leaves China unscathed July 2024. That’s perspicacity.

CrowdStrike protects businesses from hackers

A lot of business hacks come from state-backed Chinese hackers

Put 2+2 together, of course they won't use CrowdStrike in China

TokyoOldManJuly 19  11:02 pm JST

Time to devolve these Global Systems and develop local solutions, managed locally by "Professionals" locally.

That's the way it was in 1989, a few years before the WWW and 'Information Superhighway'. Too late for love. The internet was going to go global and there's no turning back. It's an evolution, not a revolution.

Re: Windows update.

Yes, this is not an update to Windows, but it was an update on Windows and their OS, by now, should have been able to detect looping and pull out of it, refusing to load the component, and continuing to boot without it.

Stop churning out new, worse versions and fix the basic resilience.

This is not a Windows update issue - it's a CrowdStrike update issue

Hmmm, then why is it not affecting linux and macos? Not challenging you, just curiosity. Also, why MS cloud services appears to be broken as well, I don't think we've learnt everything yet.

A single (supposedly tested) pushed update that identifies a windows boot file as malicious and the whole system goes down? Doesn't inspire confidence in Microsoft and Windows (if it breaks that easily).

Sh1mon M4sadaToday 05:24 am JST

Antiviruses act with a high level of permissions. If they identify part of the system as a virus, it's going to cause major problems. Also why it doesn't effect Macs and Linux as those systems are extremely different from Windows.

Another reason for cash to remain in our societies as card payments were also disrupted.