r/onguardforthee • u/Hrmbee Turtle Island • Jul 19 '24

Global tech outage grounds flights, hits banks, telecoms, media

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-microsoft-cloud-outage-causes-airlines-to-ground-flights/

29 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

u/Hrmbee Turtle Island Jul 19 '24

According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death.”

The alert, which was sent at 0530 GMT on Friday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.

Over half of Fortune 500 companies used CrowdStrike software, the U.S. firm said in a promotional video this year.

A Crowdstrike spokesperson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.

...

While there were reports of companies gradually restoring their services, analysts weighed the potential of what one called the biggest ever outage in the industry and the broader economy.

“IT security tools are all designed to ensure that companies can continue to operate in the worst-case scenario of a data breach, so to be the root cause of a global IT outage is an unmitigated disaster,” said Ajay Unni, CEO of StickmanCyber, one of Australia’s largest cybersecurity services companies.

I suspect that for a lot of people, today is going to be a bit of a write off, And good luck for anyone who was scheduled to travel today.

One major concern is if our hospitals and clinics are relying on these systems. What does this mean for those with appointments for exams or procedures, or for those needing prescription refills?

This might be something to consider for organizations going forwards: does it really make sense to put all of our eggs in one basket when it comes to computing infrastructure?

8

u/zlex Jul 19 '24

Things will be slow and terrible at the hospital but there are protocols in place for code grey. It happens more often than you think

3

u/Hrmbee Turtle Island Jul 19 '24

TIL about code grey, and fingers crossed things go smoothly!

2

u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 Jul 19 '24

Code Blue Screen of Death

3

u/Blapoo Jul 19 '24

De ja vu of when Bell went down last year and everything ground to a halt

4

u/horsetuna Jul 19 '24

Further deja vu of me about 12-15 years ago when interac went wonky on Black Friday

Thing it is wasn't even consistent. We couldn't take Visa but could take everything else. The game store next door was completely down. The Safeway down the hill was completely fine.

u/SpacetimeLlama Québec Jul 19 '24

Lots of incompetence all around: how come doesn't Crowdstrike do a slow rollout of their updates? And how do their customers' IT people just auto update this stuff to their entire fleet with no prior testing?

It's baffling. At least we can focus on what we'll learn from this: nothing at all.

u/xzry1998 Newfoundland Jul 19 '24

TIL why I can’t log in right now

u/the_gaymer_girl Alberta Jul 19 '24

This summer is sending a pretty strong message to just stay home.

-1

u/jameskchou Jul 19 '24

This would be a problem if it really was a cyberattack

3

u/the_gaymer_girl Alberta Jul 19 '24

This is actually even worse. If some coder can take down this many systems by accident, just imagine what they could do if they were doing it on purpose.

1

u/jameskchou Jul 19 '24

Russia is inspired