Major IT outage affecting banks, airlines, media outlets across the world
abc.net.au
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...
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If all the computers stuck in boot loop can't be recovered... yeah, that's a lot of cost for a lot of businesses. Add to that all the immediate impact of missed flights and who knows what happening at the hospitals. Nightmare scenario if you're responsible for it.
This sort of thing is exactly why you push updates to groups in stages, not to everything all at once.
Looks like the laptops are able to be recovered with a bit of finagling, so fortunately they haven't bricked everything.
And yeah staged updates or even just... some testing? Not sure how this one slipped through.
I'd bet my ass this was caused by terrible practices brought on by suits demanding more "efficient" releases.
"Why do we do so much testing before releases? Have we ever had any problems before? We're wasting so much time that I might not even be able to buy another yacht this year"
At least nothing like this happens in the airline industry
Certainly not! Or other industries for that matter. It's a good thing executives everywhere aren't just concentrating on squeezing the maximum amount of money out of their companies and funneling it to themselves and their buddies on the board.
Sure, let's "rightsize" the company by firing 20% of our workforce (but not management!) and raise prices 30%, and demand that the remaining employees maintain productivity at the level it used to be before we fucked things up. Oh and no raises for the plebs, we can't afford it. Maybe a pizza party? One slice per employee though.
One of my coworkers, while waiting on hold for 3+ hours with our company’s outsourced helpdesk, noticed after booting into safe mode that the Crowdstrike update had triggered a snapshot that she was able to roll back to and get back on her laptop. So at least that’s a potential solution.