Crowdstrike IT failure affecting theatres

At present it seems the ABBA abbatars are safe and ready to perform tonight and even the ticketmaster site is open to book tickets for it.

Hope no board members got hit by travel or medical appointments issues due to the problem.

It was wonderfully ironic to arrive at work this morning to discover that the IT helpdesk was having IT problems.

As it is rarely able to help anyway, I'm not sure anyone would have noticed a difference!

I clearly had a good day because i wasn't affected at all.

Someone at Microsoft is getting a good telling off, that is for sure.

But MS has to take responsibility for allowing a 3rd party to break their start-up. In the race for profitability, combined with ever-increasing complex technology, the "system" fails on many occasions, not usually on this scale. Adobe is notorious for pushing out insufficiently tested updates. Banks, Air Traffic Control, the NHS et al, have cut corners resulting in massive disruption. The compensation, if any, is usually paltry - people missing flights today are apparently not covered by their insurance, and the standard delay payouts are not to be made.

MS PR may well be tearing their hair out, but the company itself (and the wider IT world) really needs to look at its protocols.

Yes, it isn't Microsoft's fault at all.

A TL;DR would be that Crowdstrike are a company which make an anti-virus software, which is used a lot by other high-profile companies to protect their system infrastructure. They pushed an update that broke everything, so are trying to fix it.

What's happened is an update was pushed out to the software, and because anti-virus software always has to stay up-to-date to tackle newer threats, the update was downloaded on start-up as is required.

However, there is a bug in this update which has somehow made it through stress-testing and has been released to the public as part of an update. Now, when a system updates the software, and this bug is triggered, it brings it down fatally.

Hence why everything went down at the same time. Unless you use Crowdstrike anti-virus, this isn't going to affect you at all. It's mostly affected businesses and companies which use the software on their servers and employee computers.

But for some reason, it seemed like it was mistakenly reported as an issue with a Windows update (which it isn't) so I reckon their PR team is running around picking up the pieces. It is more of a PR disaster for Crowdstrike who likely won't be seeing business anytime soon. How you push out an update without testing it intensively and seeing, like, whether it actually WORKS is baffling. There's supposed to be hundreds and hundreds of protections against something like this happening but it seemed it got past it or none of them worked properly.