Crowdstrike issue

I'm irritated by the media coverage. "Global IT outage." No. Only Windows PCs that are protected by a 3rd party cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike. I can't tell you how many questions I've fielded today. "Can I use my PC?" "Is our company down?" "Can I come to work?" "Is the internet down for everyone?"

This does not affect every Windows PC on the planet (like the media is portraying). Only those companies that happen to use Crowdstrike for their cybersecurity. Yes, it's a lot of PCs. But not every PC on the planet. Not even every *Windows PC* on the planet. Yes, it's serious. No, it's not every computer in the world.
 
I'm in IT and AFAIK, no computers were affected in our company, but it's a big company. None in my region anyway. One of our 3rd party partners was affected, and their issue affected us in a very minor way just with access to a server, but there was a workaround if necessary. Glad it wasn't any worse. It's been a rough couple weeks, what with hurricanes and power outages and such. We had a generator, but it failed, so the power was up and down, up and down. Yikes.....
 
Went in to work this morning and heard about this on the radio while en route.
My desktop was out of action with the blue screen of death to which it reverted after multiple hard shutdowns while a small number of others were fine. I was able to log in on a machine in the break room as was one of my direct reports at his desk, but the applications I needed to get to were unavailable without a VPN, as though I were off our network.
I suspect that this own goal was a matter of money. I suspect the provider said something along the lines of we can make this update 99.99% reliable for X USD or we can make it 99% reliable for .7X USD. What do you want to pay for?
Oddly enough, my Widows machine at home on which I type this is fine as it was this morning.
 
This impacted 4 of the 12 windows servers at the office today. A handful of desktops, maybe 20 got tagged as well. I worked with one other tech and we were able to get those all back online in a couple hours. One of our contractors uses bitlocker and got the joy of decrypting lots of machines to recover. I believe they will be having the joy of an unplanned working weekend. I blame both crowdstrike and Microsoft. Microsoft for building a disaster of an OS, and crowdstrike for either ignorance or malice. Neither is the only company to have issues, but both have been around long enough to do better.
 
While no one in management will listen, I will hawk the virtues of the mainframe once again where we are in control rather than an assortment of vendors providing SaaS. We have a DR site and mirrored data.

Retail stores learned the lesson decades ago to have a local computer in the store to handle POS rather than relying on a computer at company HQ. Basically if the store has power they want to be able to use POS.

Moving to the cloud has gotten companies to rely on systems outside of their control.
 
This impacted 4 of the 12 windows servers at the office today. A handful of desktops, maybe 20 got tagged as well. I worked with one other tech and we were able to get those all back online in a couple hours. One of our contractors uses bitlocker and got the joy of decrypting lots of machines to recover. I believe they will be having the joy of an unplanned working weekend. I blame both crowdstrike and Microsoft. Microsoft for building a disaster of an OS, and crowdstrike for either ignorance or malice. Neither is the only company to have issues, but both have been around long enough to do better.

This was entirely a Crowdstrike issue, nothing to do with Microsoft. Like adding nitrous to your car and blaming the manufacturer of the car when the engine blows.
 
This:

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This was entirely a Crowdstrike issue, nothing to do with Microsoft. Like adding nitrous to your car and blaming the manufacturer of the car when the engine blows.
Other OS handle drivers and memory paging operations in ways that make them much less vulnerable to bad code. I do understand that CrowdStrike is who caused the issue. To continue your car analogy, Windows seems like the Lada of days of yore.
 
Was it part of an auto update that rookie companies did not vet before allowing install?

I honestly don’t understand who it got distributed? Auto update?
 
Living on the San Francisco peninsula way back when I knew people doing computer programming / coding and even today a neighbor codes and I have watched them, i would hang myself after lunch break if not the first bathroom break on the first day at work ,Yikes . it is brutal.
 
So I have not seen anything regarding what actually caused this. Anyone have a link? I presume the code was tested - so what happened?
Somebody decompiled the faulty file and posted on Twitter where the error occurs. The problem is in C++ code with an invalid pointer reference. Something that could have/should have been found by using any number of code checking tools. Rookie mistake stuff.
 
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Somebody decompiled the faulty file and posted on Twitter where the error occurs. The problem is in C++ code with an invalid pointer reference. Something that could have/should have been found by using any number of code checking tools. Rookie mistake stuff.
So again, no one tested it before it was pushed out? An invalid pointer should have shown up immediately?
 
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