'Completely unprecedented' outage causes havoc with IT systems across globe — as it happened
www.abc.net.au
A massive IT systems outage caused by issues with CrowdStrike software affects banks, airports, supermarkets and media companies across Australia and around the world.

All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It’s all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.

Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.

Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We’ll see if that changes over the weekend…

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Wow, I didn’t realize CrowdStrike was widespread enough to be a single point of failure for so much infrastructure. Lot of airports and hospitals offline.

    The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed the global ground stop for airlines including United, Delta, American, and Frontier.

    Flights grounded in the US.

    The System is Down

  • ari_verse@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    A few years ago when my org got the ask to deploy the CS agent in linux production servers and I also saw it getting deployed in thousands of windows and mac desktops all across, the first thought that came to mind was “massive single point of failure and security threat”, as we were putting all the trust in a single relatively small company that will (has?) become the favorite target of all the bad actors across the planet. How long before it gets into trouble, either because if it’s own doing or due to others?

    I guess that we now know

    • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      No bad actors did this, and security goes in fads. Crowdstrike is king right now, just as McAfee/Trellix was in the past. If you want to run around without edr/xdr software be my guest.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        If you want to run around without edr/xdr software be my guest.

        I don’t think anyone is saying that… But picking programs that your company has visibility into is a good idea. We use Wazuh. I get to control when updates are rolled out. It’s not a massive shit show when the vendor rolls out the update globally without sufficient internal testing. I can stagger the rollout as I see fit.

  • thearch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Irrelevant but I keep reading “crowd strike” as “counter strike” and it’s really messing with me

  • YTG123@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    >Make a kernel-level antivirus
    >Make it proprietary
    >Don’t test updates… for some reason??

    • CircuitSpells@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I mean I know it’s easy to be critical but this was my exact thought, how the hell didn’t they catch this in testing?

      • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Completely justified reaction. A lot of the time tech companies and IT staff get shit for stuff that, in practice, can be really hard to detect before it happens. There are all kinds of issues that can arise in production that you just can’t test for.

        But this… This has no justification. A issue this immediate, this widespread, would have instantly been caught with even the most basic of testing. The fact that it wasn’t raises massive questions about the safety and security of Crowdstrike’s internal processes.