In case you haven’t heard, we are experiencing what some have termed as “the worst global Internet outage in history”. It’s because of Crowdstrike, a security company used by many, many companies. They sent out a security patch to systems running Microsoft Windows yesterday, and that patch had issues. Computers that applied this patch then crash and can’t be restarted without removing said patch. The kicker is, getting the computer to a state where the patch can be removed is tricky, especially if the computer is not locally accessible by someone that knows how to do this sort of thing.
And because of this, airports and airlines and DMVs and banks and hospitals and telecoms and all sorts of businesses that run Microsoft Windows and use Crowdstrike to keep their systems secure and hurting bad today.
Apple devices (Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc) and Linux computers are not locally affected by this outage, but systems they access could be affected. Microsoft based computers on their own (not managed by Crowdstrike) are also not affected. I’m 99% sure your gaming computer is fine.
We have been dealing with Crowdstrike all day at work today and it looks like the fun and frivolity is going to continue into the weekend. Luckily, the applications my team at work supports all run on Linux based servers, outside of two legacy applications we inherited from another group during a recent re-organization at work.
I’m surprised a patch from a prominent security company made it into the wild with such a defect. Usually these things are caught well before they’re released to the public. As of this writing, Crowdstrike’s stock price is down over 11%. I’m a little surprised by that; I thought it’d be much more.
