Microsoft is just jealous, it took the focus from their large Azure outage, also on Friday: "Major Microsoft 365 outage caused by Azure configuration change" - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/major-micros...
To compensate and keep the focus on them, as masters of all outages...They will take at least until Tuesday, (according to their own info...) to fix the current ongoing issue with Teams scheduling: https://portal.office.com/servicestatus
Another article blaming the upstream vendor and not bothering to put any onus on the horrible security practices of companies allowing auto updating of executable code in production on critical systems.
This is unacceptable practice. I understand non tech media not getting it, but this lack of awareness from tech news is sad.
What saved my company from this is the recommended policy I’ve had the last three companies I’ve implemented this in. N -1.
The first time I ever rolled out Falcon, the sales engineer said, “if you want to be on the latest when it releases, choose this policy. Generally customers like to be one release (N -1) behind. This is the safest option in my experience. We rarely have issues but this is the way to prevent issues if we do ship something bad.”
I’ve been telling other admins this is the safest option moving forward. I don’t see a need for my org to run bleeding edge releases of newer products. This also applies to OS updates unless it’s a zero day. Major OS releases I wait for the first .1 update to release. Currently doing this with Ubuntu Desktop 24 LTS as it shipped with missing features from 22 and a broken autosetup functionality. August is the first update to 24 LTS and we’ll test and determine if the bugs have been squashed.
I can’t think of any way to always be on the latest upgrade of anything critical. All of these companies were on the bleeding edge release of CrowdStrike and it brought a lot down globally.
I wonder how they came to this number? And how reliable is it? It is very quick and relatively a very small number. Very convenient for damage management.
This outage (fuck up) impacted critical workflows. Lawyers should be foaming at the mouth to get a class action lawsuit going if criminal penalties are not applicable.
Hospitals - physicians/doctors/nurses lost access to critical equipment. Patients may have suffered degraded care as well. Reports of this outage impacting active surgeries. Patients forced to reschedule appointments around ClownStrike
Airlines - many flights grounded. Delays, delays, delays. Wasted fuel, time. Loss of revenue due to rescheduled flights, refunding customers. Local airports flooded with grounded flights, increased personnel to deal with it. FAA stressed.
Banks - many people lost access to money. Frustration for people trying to get access to pay bills, or get paid themselves.
Monocultures die fast and without survivors.
I vote we stop putting George Kurtz in charge of things.
So my org (a random medium-sized healthcare system), with ~100k seats, was more than 1% of the devices? I don't buy it.
Off by an order of magnitude for sure.
I've heard of 250k employee companies where people got a snow day off this.
Maybe I would think most non businesses will not need falcon sensor, and more critical systems will be the ones actually using it. So their “low” numbers are actually high if you only look at businesses or critical systems
That is 0001.5-M out of 1400.0-M windows devices in all.
That is about -.1% of all the MS machines.
As a linux user, I dont understand the big deal, the effects of this.
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That sounds low... Really low. E.g. NYC has ~350k employees and I know they got hit hard. Not all of them have windows machines, but let's say 100k do. I know they basically all have falcon installed. That's 100k in just one org, not even counting their windows servers. How many Fortune 500s are mainly Windows?
Edit: I did some back of napkin math. ~30 million work for a fortune 500. Let's say 2/3rds of those have a Windows desktop provided by employer, so ~20M. I think I read crowdstrike has about ~25% market share, so that's 5 mil just in fortune 500. No way it's just 8.5M