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.
We formed a crowd, then BAM, they striked.
We should have seen this coming!!!
Clown strike
Crowdstrikeout
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
why is it always the monitor to get beat
Because it’s within arm’s reach and the developers aren’t.
But the computer is within leg’s reach.
You don’t kick the box because it hurts more. If people would only wear the proper steel toe computing shoes more crap computers would get their just desserts.
You just have to use the side of your foot (like in soccer) instead of the front.
Back in the day it was a very think pane of glass that I couldn’t really harm. Now, I do not punch the monitor.
Was the keyboard for my friend.
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.
Same where I’m at. 😞
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.
GroupStrike?
CohortAttack?
PeerOffense?
Gang… Wait no
UnionBuster
StrikeThree
Groupon
deleted by creator
Maybe not everywhere, but all of ours are air gapped.
Good, they absolutely should be.
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.
Any critical devices should be airgapped while in service.
I assume these systems were not connected to any network. Same can’t be said for the front desk systems though.
Mine was in surgery yesterday. I hope yours is doing well.
It did impact emergency services
I’ve heard anecdotally that some 911 services were down in my area, but I can’t speak to how wide that was.
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).
Security through obsolescence the healthcare way!
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.
If a company disguises a software update as a virus definition update, that be a huge scandal and no serious company should ever work with them again…are you sure that’s what happened?
It wasn’t a virus definitions update. It was a driver update. The driver is used to identify and block threats incoming from wifi and wired internet.
The “Outage” section of the Wikipedia article goes into more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident#Outage
Ah, was a bit off. The update disregarded update controls per reddit and I must have misunderstood what exactly the channel update did. I know for the sensors you can set how closely you want to track current releases but I guess the driver update is not considered under those rules. I use CrowdStrike in my day to day but not from the administrative side, sorry for the misinformation. Thanks for the details Gestrid.
100% agree. I haven’t been on the backend of managing crowdstrike so I don’t know if this is a option, but running a wsuz server and manually weeding out bad updates was such an improvement over rawdogging windows updates.
Yeah but testing costs money and CEO needs new private island, his old one is too small.
And the kids on the island are too old now
Really there’s a sub-joke here about how, because no one ever bothers scanning their Mac for viruses since they think they’re virus-proof, all the Macs are functioning as the virus farms they’ve been for quite some time.
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:
most Linux “Users” would’nt be that stupid. it nearly always takes a noob in a CEO position (okay, just saying CEO is sufficient here) to blindly trust malware distributers and their ads.
Sure but I’m not using their software. I’m careful about what I allow to have kernel access on my machines.
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’s interesting that Microsoft is getting a lot of flack from this.
Yeah, this isn’t really the fault of windows.
Windows normalized running third party software as kernel level code.
Third parties love their trojans just being treated as normal way of life.
“Anti-cheats” instead of not being imbeciles while designing protocols for multiplayer, “anti-viruses” which need to run kernel-level and download databases with executable code, video drivers which just can’t be packaged with Windows.
One thing I’ve realized is that large parts of social structure are dependent on cheating. We all want to cheat, so we all agree to a system where cheating is possible, but pretend it’s not happening until someone gets caught and then just behave as if nothing happened.
One necessary part of someone’s upbringing is honesty. There’s an amazingly deep moment in LOTR where Eomer says that Rohirrim don’t lie, so they are not easily deceived.
This is not a poetic device. This is how it works. Ponzi schemes usually target people who think they are smarter and more cunning and will gain something from them. And rigged security systems work because most of participants think they are the ones who may at some point abuse those systems, but most of them are the ones becoming eventually victims of such abuse.
If there is any software you want running at kernel though it is your AV. Not saying Spotify has a reason for running at kernel though… But running AV at kernel in theory is a better way to protect the machine and you.
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.
Their computers may not be affected, but their everyday lives might be. Some of the affected services include 911, stoplights, banks, hospitals, and a whole other smorgasbord of stuff.
It’s a general security solution. They run on Mac and Linux as well. It just happened that crowdstrike only released the broken update for windows.
They make security software for every OS. My company has it running on our Macs, and Linux servers as well. It just happened to only break windows because that’s what they released the update for.
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.
so i misunderstood. sry then.
and yes, every company running an alltime-ever-in-news-due-to-critical-exploitable-bugs-in-the-mailclient already IS in freefall after that said jump.
I was puzzled since my work continued on as usual. I guess my company doesn’t use it.
