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Fault in CrowdStrike caused airports, businesses and healthcare services to languish in ‘largest outage in history’
Services began to come back online on Friday evening after an IT failure that wreaked havoc worldwide. But full recovery could take weeks, experts have said, after airports, healthcare services and businesses were hit by the “largest outage in history”.
Flights and hospital appointments were cancelled, payroll systems seized up and TV channels went off air after a botched software upgrade hit Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
It came from the US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, and left workers facing a “blue screen of death” as their computers failed to start. Experts said every affected PC may have to be fixed manually, but as of Friday night some services started to recover.
As recovery continues, experts say the outage underscored concerns that many organizations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT system, or a piece of software within it, goes down. But these outages will happen again, experts say, until more contingencies are built into networks and organizations introduce better back-ups.
Like it or not, that is the most effective way to collect the data these solutions need.
This isn’t riot anti cheat where it is of questionable effectiveness. Crowdstrike was demonstrably amazing at its job.
Crowdstrike has clients that run on MacOS and Linux. Only the Windows version requires kernel level access. I believe it has something to do with the absolute shitshow that is Windows security model but it might also be because it runs a 31-year-old filesystem that still doesn’t allow one process to read another process’s files while they’re open.
There have been issues with Linux and Mac clients in the past. Not to this scale but market share is very much a factor.
Kernel access is a mess but it is also important to understand that even the less priveleged software can cause problems.
I do firmly believe more hardware should run Linux but it is also important to understand the support burden. But, regardless, that is a different conversation.
Less privileged software can also cause problems, but you can limit the scope in which those problems can occur.