This global Microsoft Outage

[SSpratt]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et

Any worries? It is chaos out there by the look of the news.

My experience is that I’m not able to work today and had trouble using my debit card this morning. The transaction eventually went through but it’s not showing on my account.

Planes are currently flying in and out of Stanstead, but they've recently announced around 4 cancelled flights over the tannoy.

No further context, just told passengers to leave the airport and rebook their flights.

And completely missing the point that some people might need to go shopping today, I mean I'd still have needed the bread and milk if the eggs were sitting looking at me.

I saw overnight that in Australia there were problems in supermarkets. I guess it depends if their software is Microsoft based?

We've been told we have to take our laptops in for a physical restore if we had problems, colleagues in Spain were all suffering the Blue screen of Death today. I manged to get access fine but I'm saving copies of work into Google sheets just in case.

Lol someone dho doesn't work in IT

This happens probably a lot more than people realise. It’s just noticeable when it’s on a global scale and then picked up by the media.
Mistakes happen and while companies are constantly trying to cut costs they are going to be more frequent. Having worked as a software developer for 15 years, the whole industry is becoming a complete mess.

I meant to post in the bus driver thread! 🤣🤣

Having said that. Microsoft are a bunch of cunts too.

No, but my DH does - for a large organisation that has been affected and he is very critical of the way things are moving. He is acutely aware that there is too much reliance on external global providers for some very fundamental services we rely on.

Hiya - work in IT Management here.

The issue has occurred because a cyber security firm called Crowdstrike updated it's software and all computers (endpoints) with the Crowdstrike Agent on them went into a boot loop, this is because the update was faulty.

It will require a lot of manual work by IT techs to get things up and runing again purely because once a machine is in a boot loop, you cannot easily get it back out of one again. It will take most likely weeks if not months to fully recover from this outage and it is certainly the biggest one I have seen.

• It is nothing to do with "putting everything in the same cloud" but it is not helpful monocultures exist like this.
• It is not the apocalypse
• At present, it is not thought to be a cyber attack, in fact quite the opposite, it is a cyber security company borking their OWN software.
• It is not a Microsofts fault this has happened, thus far, it is Crowdstrikes fault this happened, but Microsoft systems are affected.
• The only answer at present is to have your machine rebuilt, or for an IT tech to attempt to get in via safemode, although if the machine is encrypted that is not working for a lot of people.

Personally, I think the whole industry has been in a mess ever since it started in the 80s. Far too many different people/organisations doing their own thing, creating their own operating systems/software, very little compatibility across platforms, etc. Too many firms selling out and being taken over and their software/platforms being abandoned meaning their users have no choice but to transition over to other systems leaving unaccessible archives and lost functionality. I don't think there has ever been a time in the past 50 years when the IT World was "joined up" and efficient. We even had IT software programmers writing code and using operating systems in the 80s and 90s which wasn't going to be year 2000 compliant, yet they didn't give a moment's thought to what will happen when, inevitably, it reaches 31/12/1999 - it was as if they never thought it would happen! The whole industry has been a shambles for 50 years and shows no signs of improving. Too many IT managers who think their systems are the best, they think they need to write their own systems despite off the shelf packages being readily available which do the same thing better, they don't build in cross platform compatibility despite it being blindingly obvious that systems should be able to communicate with each other.

But this outage is absolutely nothing to with my Microsoft. They've done nothing to cause this. It's a third party company whose mistake is affecting Microsoft systems.

Well with all due respect to your husband, the marketplace doesn't really dictate much of a choice does it.

Most people run on Windows for a start, and as for Crowdstrike, there are numerous cyber security companies out there, this is just one of them.

Unless your husband is planning on creating his own threat intelligence software, there is very little choice but to rely on external providers for cyber security and if it's any consolation, it is highly likely that Crowdstrike will not survive this - their shares have already plummeted and anyone who's anyone will likely very quickly migrate away from this vendor leaving them crippled.

The answer is having a decent disaster recovery scenario, but in situations like this, it's exceptional in my opinion.

Perhaps you need to get a MAC?

A back up system would provide absolutely no use whatsoever when the END POINTS getting the update are the problem.

Once the update goes out onto the endpoint that's it, game over.

It's like once you have covid, you have covid. A backup system would be absolutely NOT helpful in this situation. It is a computer issue now, it possibly WAS an incompetence issue previously, we don't know yet.

I do agree but I think it’s got worse. I’ve worked with developers who just copy and paste code without knowing what it does. Management who go for the cheapest option to make themselves look good and then leave a complete shitshow behind. Proper development takes time and money but so many companies want everything cheaply and quickly without really understanding the impact of it.

Macs are fine for end users but are useless as servers

My GP was supposed to call me this morning but couldn't, but she just called said their system is sort of back now

The IT industry has always been a shit show. It moves too fast.

That being said I think we're going to be having more issues like this as devs over-rely on LLM AIs writing chunks of their code for them

But it does have something to do wit MS. MS has chosen this third party to provide essential services. I worked in 3rd party raising in the tech sector, MS bares the responsibility to its customers, MD processes chose this 3rd party rather than one that didn't make such a mistake. 3rd parties and MS work very closely together, lawyers are part of this relationship as are developers and may others, it's a close partnership.

Shivers at memories of trying to get a Windows server 2008 sorted ...

If you want a server, you need a server OS. If I had a free rein, I'd plump for Debian but Red Hat Enterprise would be acceptable.

I personally run a Linux desktop which hasn't gone down in a decade.

Microsoft didn't choose CrowdStrike. Some of Microsoft's customers chose CrowdStrike. There are other anti-virus vendors but if you don't like any of those you could instead use Microsoft Defender which comes built-in to Windows.

Looks like CrowdStrike offshore their testing and QA team members.

Of course even the none Windows, backed up, UK ATC IT system had meltdown last year.

An issue with data ( a duplicate waypoint name that popped up twice on a flight plan, combined with other rare factors) brought both the main and the backup systems gently grinding to a safe but gentle full stop.

If you want to integrate with O365 and Microsoft's other services, Windows-based servers are difficult to completely avoid. But you're right - Linux is a much better server OS than Windows is.

Having spent a good few years with a Linux desktop as my primary machine and with using multiple Linux boxes every day, Linux isn't as good as Windows or OSX as a desktop OS.

No, Crowdstrike is written by a third party for Windows (and others), and organizations who use Microsoft systems have CHOSEN to use it. I work in IT and don't use it here, hence absolutely no problems whatsoever.

It's MS compatible so will have some sort of business relationship and agreement with MS.