'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…

  • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
    77·
    5 months ago

    Maybe centralizing everything onto one company’s shoulders wasn’t such a great idea after all…

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      221·
      5 months ago

      Wait, monopolies are bad? This is the first I’ve ever heard of this concept. So much so that I actually coined the term “monopoly” just now to describe it.

      • joostjakob@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        5 months ago

        Someone should invent a game, that while playing demonstrates how much monopolies suck for everyone involved (except the monopolist)

        • KingJalopy @lemm.eeEnglish
          9·
          5 months ago

          And make it so you lose friends and family over the course of the 4+ hour game. Also make a thimble to fight over, that would be dope.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          I’m sure a game that’s so on the nose with its message could never become a commercialised marketing gimmick that perversely promotes existing monopolies. Capitalists wouldn’t dare.

      • tibi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        142·
        5 months ago

        Crowdstrike is not a monopoly. The problem here was having a single point of failure, using a piece of software that can access the kernel and autoupdate running on every machine in the organization.

        At the very least, you should stagger updates. Any change done to a business critical server should be validated first. Automatic updates are a bad idea.

        Obviously, crowdstrike messed up, but so did IT departments in every organization that allowed this to happen.

        • h0rnman@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          9·
          5 months ago

          You wildly underestimate most corporate IT security’s obsession with pushing updates to products like this as soon as they release. They also often have the power to make such nonsense the law of the land, regardless of what best practices dictate. Maybe this incident will shed some light on how bad of an idea auto updates are and get C-levels to do something about it, but even if they do, it’ll only last until the next time someone gets compromised by a flaw that was fixed in a dot-release

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Monopolies aren’t absolute, ever, but having nearly 25% market share is a problem, and is a sign of an oligopoly. Crowdstrike has outsized power and has posted article after article boasting of its dominant market position for many years running.

          I think monopoly-like conditions have become so normalised that people don’t even recognise them for what they are.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Well now that I’ve invented the concept for the first time, we should invent laws about it. We’ll get in early, develop a monopoly on monopoly legislation and steer it so it benefits us.

          Wow, monopolies rule!

      • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        I mean, I’m sure those companies that have them don’t think so—when they aren’t the cause of muti-industry collapses.