Live: Global IT outage affecting banks, airlines, media outlets across the world
www.abc.net.au
There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

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…

    • @[email protected]English
      78•4 months ago

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

      • @[email protected]English
        21•4 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.

        • @[email protected]English
          14•4 months ago

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

          • KingJalopy English
            9•4 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.

          • @[email protected]English
            3•4 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.

        • @[email protected]English
          12•4 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.

          • @[email protected]English
            9•4 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

          • @[email protected]English
            1•4 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.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•4 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!

        • @[email protected]English
          2•4 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.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•4 months ago

      Since when has any antivirus ever had the intent of actually protecting against viruses? The entire antivirus market is a scam.