this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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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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[–] Sylence@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yep, stuck at the airport currently. All flights grounded. All major grocery store chains and banks also impacted. Bad day to be a crowdstrike employee!

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[–] victorz@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

If these affected systems are boot looping, how will they be fixed? Reinstall?

[–] Sylence@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)

There is a fix people have found which requires manual booting into safe mode and removal of a file causing the BSODs. No clue if/how they are going to implement a fix remotely when the affected machines can't even boot.

[–] letsgo@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Probably have to go old-skool and actually be at the machine.

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[–] upside431@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

Interesting day

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 0 points 4 months ago

Wow, I didn't realize CrowdStrike was widespread enough to be a single point of failure for so much infrastructure. Lot of airports and hospitals offline.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed the global ground stop for airlines including United, Delta, American, and Frontier.

Flights grounded in the US.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)

The thought of a local computer being unable to boot because some remote server somewhere is unavailable makes me laugh and sad at the same time.

[–] rxxrc@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I don't think that's what's happening here. As far as I know it's an issue with a driver installed on the computers, not with anything trying to reach out to an external server. If that were the case you'd expect it to fail to boot any time you don't have an Internet connection.

Windows is bad but it's not that bad yet.

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[–] jedibob5@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

Huh. I guess this explains why the monitor outside of my flight gate tonight started BSoD looping. And may also explain why my flight was delayed by an additional hour and a half...

[–] richtellyard@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is going to be a Big Deal for a whole lot of people. I don't know all the companies and industries that use Crowdstrike but I might guess it will result in airline delays, banking outages, and hospital computer systems failing. Hopefully nobody gets hurt because of it.

[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Big chunk of New Zealands banks apparently run it, cos 3 of the big ones can't do credit card transactions right now

[–] oderus@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It was mayhem at PakNSave a bit ago.

[–] emmanuel_car@kbin.run 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In my experience it’s always mayhem at PakNSave.

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[–] alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

One possible fix is to delete a particular file while booting in safe mode. But then they'll need to fix each system manually. My company encrypts the disks as well so it's going to be a even bigger pain (for them). I'm just happy my weekend started early.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You have ta have access to boot in safe mode too, I guess I can't on my work pc for example.

What a shitty workaround & might crowd strike burn in hell lol

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[–] moe90@feddit.nl 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

don't rely on one desktop OS too much. diversity is the best.

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[–] r00ty@kbin.life 0 points 4 months ago

Apparently at work "some servers are experiencing problems". Sadly, none of the ones I need to use :(

[–] Pudutr0n@feddit.cl 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is a better article. It's a CrowdStrike issue with an update (security software)

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[–] solrize@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

Xfinity H&I network it down so I can't watch Star Trek. I get an error msg connection failure. Other channels work though.

[–] kadotux@sopuli.xyz 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

Here's the fix: 1)Boot to safe mode/recovery 2)Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike 3)Delete the file matching "C-00000291*.sys" 4)Boot the system normally

[–] CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago

A driver failure, yeesh. It always sucks to deal with it.

[–] StV2@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (11 children)

It's disappointing that the fix is so easy to perform and yet it'll almost certainly keep a lot of infrastructure down for hours because a majority of people seem too scared to try to fix anything on their own machine (or aren't trusted to so they can't even if they know how)

[–] HaleHirsute@infosec.pub 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

They also gotta get the fix through a trusted channel and not randomly on the internet. (No offense to the person that gave the info, it’s maybe correct but you never know)

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[–] r00ty@kbin.life 0 points 4 months ago

It might not even be that. A lot of places have many servers (and even more virtual servers) running crowdstrike. Some places also seem to have it on endpoints too.

That's a lot of machines to manually fix.

[–] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

And people need to travel to remote machines to do this in person

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[–] thehatfox@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Might seem easy to someone with a technical background. But the last thing businesses want to be doing is telling average end users to boot into safe mode and start deleting system files.

If that started happening en masse we would quickly end up with far more problems than we started with. Plenty of users would end up deleting system32 entirely or something else equally damaging.

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.


The original article contains 52 words, the summary contains 52 words. Saved 0%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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[–] ililiililiililiilili@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago

My dad needed a CT scan this evening and the local ER's system for reading the images was down. So they sent him via ambulance to a different hospital 40 miles away. Now I'm reading tonight that CrowdStrike may be to blame.

[–] UncleArthur@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Annoyingly, my laptop seems to be working perfectly.

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[–] sasquash@sopuli.xyz 0 points 4 months ago (23 children)

never do updates on a Friday.

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[–] ari_verse@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

A few years ago when my org got the ask to deploy the CS agent in linux production servers and I also saw it getting deployed in thousands of windows and mac desktops all across, the first thought that came to mind was "massive single point of failure and security threat", as we were putting all the trust in a single relatively small company that will (has?) become the favorite target of all the bad actors across the planet. How long before it gets into trouble, either because if it's own doing or due to others?

I guess that we now know

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[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

My work PC is affected. Nice!

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

Plot twist: you're head of IT

[–] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Dammit, hit us at 5pm on Friday in NZ

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[–] r00ty@kbin.life 0 points 4 months ago

My favourite thing has been watching sky news (UK) operate without graphics, trailers, adverts or autocue. Back to basics.

[–] jedibob5@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (12 children)

Reading into the updates some more... I'm starting to think this might just destroy CloudStrike as a company altogether. Between the mountain of lawsuits almost certainly incoming and the total destruction of any public trust in the company, I don't see how they survive this. Just absolutely catastrophic on all fronts.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rxxrc@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah saw that several steel mills have been bricked by this, that's months and millions to restart

[–] gazter@aussie.zone 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Got a link? I find it hard to believe that a process like that would stop because of a few windows machines not booting.

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[–] IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)

What lawsuits do you think are going to happen?

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[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Agreed, this will probably kill them over the next few years unless they can really magic up something.

They probably don't get sued - their contracts will have indemnity clauses against exactly this kind of thing, so unless they seriously misrepresented what their product does, this probably isn't a contract breach.

If you are running crowdstrike, it's probably because you have some regulatory obligations and an auditor to appease - you aren't going to be able to just turn it off overnight, but I'm sure there are going to be some pretty awkward meetings when it comes to contract renewals in the next year, and I can't imagine them seeing much growth

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[–] ThrowawaySobriquet@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think you're on the nose, here. I laughed at the headline, but the more I read the more I see how fucked they are. Airlines. Industrial plants. Fucking governments. This one is big in a way that will likely get used as a case study.

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[–] rozodru@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 months ago (7 children)

It's just amatuer hour across the board. Were they testing in production? no code review or even a peer review? they roll out for a Friday? It's like basic level start up company "here's what not to do" type shit that a junior dev fresh out of university would know. It's like "explain to the project manager with crayons why you shouldn't do this" type of shit.

It just boggles my mind that if you're rolling out an update to production that there was clearly no testing. There was no review of code cause experts are saying it was the result of poorly written code.

Regardless if you're low level security then apparently you can just boot into safe and rename the crowdstrike folder and that should fix it. higher level not so much cause you're likely on bitlocker which...yeah don't get me started no that bullshit.

regardless I called out of work today. no point. it's friday, generally nothing gets done on fridays (cause we know better) and especially today nothing is going to get done.

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