A crowdstrike update has caused millions of windows system to blue screen and go into a reboot loop taking out airlines and other critical infrastructure worldwide. It's going to be a long few days for system admins everywhere.
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Can someone explain to me how anti-ddos software going down causes such widespread outages? Am I missing something?
I can. Crowdstrike t's antivirus software on lots of business computers and servers. The software updates itself regularly with the latest version. Someone fucked up with developing the latest version and it contained a pretty bad bug that got past testing. This bug caused the machine that it's on to blue screen and go into a reboot cycle. The only way to fix it is to manually boot the computer in safe mode and delete the updated version/file that has the bug.
It get's even more complicated if you use encryption software like bitlocker. You need to manually type in a 48-digit numerical password to unlock the encryption so you can delete the stupid file.
Imagine having to do this exact thing on 50,000 computers this weekend. That's how many systems are affected at just some companies. Millions of systems affected overall. Thank your stars you don't work in IT.
I will add that in the scale of IT fuckups, the fix actually is pretty straight forward and probably takes just a few minutes. It just gets hard when you have a lot of remote or virtual systems and can't automate a fix.