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Post by stanleyb on Jul 19, 2024 9:01:00 GMT
It’s days like this that makes me suspicious of using Cloud storage. Everything in Microsoft seems to be down. Luckily I got my stuff backup up for occasions like this.
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Post by MartinT on Jul 19, 2024 9:06:44 GMT
Still have access to 365 and my OneDrive out here in Slovenia.
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Post by stanleyb on Jul 19, 2024 10:09:31 GMT
It seems to have affected a few countries mainly. Mind you it’s a bit suspicious that you are conveniently out of the country when this happened. Insider knowledge?😉
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Post by petea on Jul 19, 2024 11:56:22 GMT
I wonder where that ‘update’ was posted from: he still has access to his OneDrive apparently. Very suspicious!  |
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Post by Tim on Jul 19, 2024 12:27:02 GMT
Still have access to 365 and my OneDrive out here in Slovenia. Of course you do Martin, you're one of the chosen  |
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Post by nicholas on Jul 19, 2024 12:38:50 GMT
(Reuters) - A software update wreaked havoc on computer systems globally on Friday, grounding flights, forcing some broadcasters off air and hitting services from banking to healthcare.
An update to a product offered by global cyberscurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to be the trigger, affecting customers using Microsoft's Windows Operating System. Microsoft said later on Friday the issue had been fixed.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that the company was "actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts" and that a fix was being deployed.
"This is not a security incident or cyberattack," Kurtz said in the post.
Early on Friday, major U.S. airlines - American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines - grounded flights, while other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions.
Banks and financial services companies from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions and traders across markets spoke of problems with executing transaction.
"We are having the mother of all global market outages," one trader said.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports posted on X by medical officials said, while Sky News, one of the country's major news broadcasters was off air, apologising for being unable to transmit live, and soccer club Manchester United said on X that it had to postpone a scheduled release of tickets.
Microsoft's cloud unit Azure said it was aware of the issue that impacted virtual machines running Windows OS and the CrowdStrike Falcon agent getting stuck in a "restarting state," amid an ongoing global outage.
"We're aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform. We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
In an alert to clients issued at 0530 GMT on Friday, CrowdStrike said its "Falcon Sensor" software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the "Blue Screen of Death". It also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue.
Over half of Fortune 500 companies used CrowdStrike software, the U.S. firm said in a promotional video this year.
"This is a a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure," said Ciaran Martin, Professor at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre.
The outages rippled far and wide.
Airports in Singapore, Hong Kong and India said the outage meant some airlines were having to check in passengers manually.
Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, one of Europe's busiest, said it was affected, while airline Iberia said it had been operating manually at airports until its electronic check-in counters and online check-ins were reactivated. It said there had been some delays but no flight cancellations.
Air France-KLM said its operations were disrupted.
The Dutch foreign affairs ministry told Dutch press agency ANP it had been affected. A spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
While there were reports of companies gradually restoring their services, analysts weighed the potential of what one called the biggest ever outage in the industry and the broader economy.
"IT security tools are all designed to ensure that companies can continue to operate in the worst-case scenario of a data breach, so to be the root cause of a global IT outage is an unmitigated disaster," said Ajay Unni, CEO of StickmanCyber, one of Australia's largest cybersecurity services companies.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Tomasz Janowski; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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Post by Slinger on Jul 19, 2024 13:37:29 GMT
MORE Microsoft IT outage live: NHS hospital declares
critical incident and airports hit in global chaos
Airlines, rail companies, banks and the NHS among
those affected by global outage.Microsoft has said the underlying cause of a massive global IT problem that has caused chaos for airlines, train companies, banks, the NHS and other businesses around the world has been fixed but that some services are still being affected. A host of companies and institutions affected around the world by a global outage linked to IT giant Microsoft and cyber security firm CrowdStrike. In the UK, the outage caused disruption in the majority of NHS GP practices and some hospital trusts - Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident. Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Edinburgh were among the airports impacted. Among the rail operators affected are Avanti West Coast, Great Western Railway, Southern and Thameslink. One traveller at Gatwick Airport queuing for over three-and-a-half hours has described the scene at the travel hub as “bedlam”. An emergency Cobra meeting was held by the government on Friday morning to discuss the issue. SOURCEA number of shops have reported not being able to take card payments amid the worldwide IT outage. Customers across the country have faced issues with trying to pay using their cards, with some shops putting up “ cash only” signs on their doors. A spokesman for the supermarket Morrisons said there were some “ isolated incidents” with payment systems this morning, which have now been resolved and systems are working normally. There are serious questions of course for CrowdStrike. But also Microsoft: what due diligence do they perform on third party providers and on individual updates before they're released across their globally dominant system? MartinT When did you think you were flying home? |
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Post by MartinT on Jul 19, 2024 14:53:39 GMT
At one point we were delayed until much later tonight. That's been recovered to boarding in about 15 mins. Landing at Gatwick, that's another matter!
The blame is firmly with CrowdStrike and the due diligence is with the companies using it. Questions will be asked, but I don't think MS could possibly vet every patch issued by every third party vendor using its OS. That's not how it works.
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Post by Slinger on Jul 19, 2024 15:11:58 GMT
At one point we were delayed until much later tonight. That's been recovered to boarding in about 15 mins. Landing at Gatwick, that's another matter! The blame is firmly with CrowdStrike and the due diligence is with the companies using it. Questions will be asked, but I don't think MS could possibly vet every patch issued by every third party vendor using its OS. That's not how it works. Part of the reason behind enormous salaries for top jobs is that the buck DOES stop here and the top man (or woman) is expected to fall on his sword if the merde hits the ventilator. Satya Nadella, come on down... |
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Post by MartinT on Jul 19, 2024 15:20:30 GMT
Nope. George Kurtz.
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Post by MikeMusic on Jul 19, 2024 16:42:09 GMT
Word is they took on Liz Truss and this was her first day....
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Post by MikeMusic on Jul 19, 2024 19:52:13 GMT
from BBC
Microsoft is advising clients to try a classic method to get things working - turning it off and on again - in some cases up to 15 times.
I can do that !
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Post by Slinger on Jul 19, 2024 22:11:19 GMT
Here you ho , MartinT Clear as mud... threadreaderapp.com/thread/1814376668095754753.htmlCrowdstrike Analysis: It was a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language. Since I am a professional C++ programmer, let me decode this stack trace dump for you.  Memory in your computer is laid out as one giant array of numbers. We represent these numbers here as hexadecimal, which is base 16 (hexadecimal) because it's easier to work with... for reasons. The problem area? The computer tried to read memory address 0x9c (aka 156). Why is this bad? This is an invalid region of memory for any program. Any program that tries to read from this region WILL IMMEDIATELY GET KILLED BY WINDOWS. That is what you see here with this stack dump. So why is memory address 0x9c trying to be read from? Well because... programmer error. It turns out that C++, the language crowdstrike is using, likes to use address 0x0 as a special value to mean " there's nothing here", don't try to access it or you'll die. Programmers in C++ are supposed to check for this when they pass objects around by "checking full null". Usually you'll see something like this: string* p = get_name();
if (p == NULL) { print("Could not get name"); }
The string* part means we have a "pointer" to the start of the string value. If it's null, then there's nothing there, don't try to access it. So let's take a generic object with stuff in it: struct Obj {
int a;
int b;
};
if we create a pointer to it: Obj* obj = new Obj();
We can get it's start address, let's say its something random like 0x9030=36912 (I'm using small numbers) Then the address of: obj is 0x9030
obj->a is 0x9030 + 0x4
obj->b is 0x9030 + 0x8
Each member is an offset from the start address. Now let's assume the following: Obj* obj = NULL;
Then the address of: obj is 0
obj->a is 0 + 4
obj->b is 0 + 8
So if I do this on a NULL pointer: print(obj->a);
The program stack dump like what you'll see above. It will cannot read value 0x000000004 In this stack dump you see that it's trying to read memory value 0x9c. In human numbers, this is the value 156. So what happened is that the programmer forgot to check that the object it's working with isn't valid, it tried to access one of the objects member variables... NULL + 0x9C = 0x9C = 156.
That's an invalid region of memory. And what's bad about this is that this is a special program called a system driver, which has PRIVLIDGED access to the computer. So the operating system is forced to, out of an abundance of caution, crash immediately This is what is causing the blue screen of death. A computer can recover from a crash in non-privileged code by simply terminating the program, but not a system driver. When your computer crashes, 95% of the time it's because it's a crash in the system drivers. If the programmer had done a check for NULL, or if they used modern tooling that checks these sorts of things, it could have been caught. But somehow it made it into production and then got pushed as a forced update by Crowdstrike... OOPS! The fix going forward is that Microsoft needs to have better policies to roll back defective drivers and not just raw dog risky updates to customers. Crowdstrike will likely promote their code safety officer to put in code sanitization tools that will catch this automatically. And Crowdstrike will likely take a hard look at rewriting their system driver from what it currently is, C++ to a more modern language like Rust, which doesn't have this problem. For people looking for a conspiracy, the replacement language for C++, Rust, is compromised by a cabal of woke tards that are doing strange things. It's possible this could be a plot to move mission-critical code to Rust. It's the only other language Linux is allowing, other than C. But who knows. |
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Post by MartinT on Jul 19, 2024 23:10:02 GMT
I would agree that Microsoft should work on improving Windows' responses to poor driver programming to allow better recovery from badly written privileged code.
However, in no way does that let CrowdStrike off the hook for negligent lack of testing of a patch they were releasing to millions of subscribers!
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Post by Slinger on Jul 23, 2024 14:22:00 GMT
It's now been announced that a Null pointer issue was not the cause of the outage. Crowstrike released the Technical Details where they state that the error was due to named pipe execution and, "... not related to null bytes contained within Channel File 291 or any other Channel File". FULL STORYExecuting an Operation on a Named Pipe |
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Post by MartinT on Jul 23, 2024 14:28:03 GMT
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Post by Slinger on Jul 23, 2024 14:42:09 GMT
Fekkin OUCH!
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Post by Slinger on Jul 25, 2024 16:44:05 GMT
DOH!
CrowdStrike: Company that caused global techno
meltdown offers partners $10 vouchers to say
sorry - and they don't workThe company behind the world's worst IT outage has given gift cards to its teammates
and partners to apologise and thank them for the extra work during last week's meltdown.The firm behind the global IT outage that cost companies billions grounded 5% of the world's air traffic and brought NHS systems to their knees has given out $10 food vouchers to say sorry. And for some, they don't even work. CrowdStrike sought to thank and apologise to its ' teammates' and partners for the extra workload resulting from the outage last Friday which knocked out millions of computers worldwide. According to a screenshot said to be part of the thank you email sent out to staff, the firm recognised the " additional work" the 19 July incident caused " and for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience". But some recipients posted on social media that it hadn't worked for them. TechCrunch, who originally reported the story, said they tried applying one of the gift cards but an error came up on the Uber Eats page saying it " has been cancelled by the issuing party and is no longer valid." A CrowdStrike spokesperson said in a statement to Sky News: " CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. " We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. " Uber flagged it as "fraud" because of high usage rates," they added. Last week's outage, which has been described as the world's worst as its effects are still being felt today, was caused by a faulty software update which affected an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows PCs devices. It caused delays for airports, broadcasters, hospitals and businesses. Problems came to light soon after the latest version of CrowdStrikes Falcon sensor software was rolled out on Friday. The update was meant to make systems more secure against hacking but instead caused devices to display a " blue screen of death" due to faulty code. In an update on Wednesday on its investigation into the crisis, CrowdStrike said a code fault had slipped past its own safety procedures, forcing computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system to crash. CrowdStrike added that a " new check" had since been put in place in a bid to prevent a repeat of the issue. The extent of the economic damage is still being assessed and may never be truly known. A report by insurer Parametrix estimated on Wednesday that the total direct financial loss facing US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, was $5.4bn. SOURCE
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Post by MartinT on Jul 25, 2024 18:59:44 GMT
$10 vouchers FFS.
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Post by Slinger on Jul 25, 2024 21:00:24 GMT
I believe the word is " risible". |
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