this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
549 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59454 readers
4548 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not really criticism, it's competitors claiming they will never fuck up.
Like, if you found mouse in your hamburger at McDonald's, that's a massive fuckup. If Burger King then started saying "you'll never find anything gross in Burger King food!" that would be both crass opportunism and patently false.
It's reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it's not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.
But also Microsoft fucked up. And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too. Delta shut down, cancelling 4,600 flights. American Airlines cancelled 43 flights, 10 of which would have been cancelled even without the outage.
Like, imagine if some diners at McDonald's connected their mouths to a chute that delivers pre-chewed food sight-unseen into their gullets, and then got mad when they fell ill from eating a mouse. Don't do that, not at any restaurant.
All that said, if you fuck up, you don't get to complain about your competitors being crass opportunists.
In what way did Microsoft fuck up? They don't control Crowdstrike updates. Short of the OS files being immutable it seems unlikely they can stop things like this.
Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.
CrowdStrike pushed an errant update. Microsoft allowed a single errant update to cause an unrecoverable boot loop. CrowdStrike is the market leader in their sector and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but Microsoft is older than the internet and creates hundreds of billions of dollars. CrowdStrike was the primary cause, but Microsoft enabled the meltdown.
Microsoft did not "give Crowdstrike access to push updates". The IT departments of the companies did.
The security features that Crowdstrike has forces them to run in kernel-space, which means that they will have code running that can crash the OS. They crashed Debian in an almost identical way (forced boot loop) about a month before they did the same to Windows.
Yes, there are ways that Microsoft could rewrite the Windows kernel architecture to make it resistant to this type of failure. But I don't think there are very many other commercial OS's that could stop this from happening.
You're absolutely right, here is an in-depth explanation from Dave Plummer, the guy who wrote the task manager: https://youtu.be/ZHrayP-Y71Q