Unless you’ve been living under a whole fucking mountain the past week, you’ve certainly at least heard about a… shall we say, big problem… which occurred with an estimated 8.5 million Windows based computers running CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor software package — a software solution designed to prevent cyberattacks which, ironically, became kind of a cyber attack itself.
In short summary of what happened, update gets pushed out, update is flawed, update causes Windows machines running the software to completely crash, crippling any and all services relying on these now unusable systems. I mostly, personally, had a laugh about it. I wasn’t affected directly, but I did see some of the side effects in my day job. Still, such a massive outage caused by software intended to help protect against bad actors causing such outages is not only ironic but pretty messed up on a whole.
Anyway, the root cause was quickly enough found, but understanding just how and why this happened was a bit more of a complicated thing. Several people have shared their thoughts and takes on it, but I found this video by Dave’s Garage on YouTube to be a nice concise explanation of things, without trying to spin it. This is a former Windows developer talking about the problem from his experience with the operating system. What more could you really want?
It’s pretty damn wild, really, but at this stage nothing really surprises me anymore.