Global IT outage affecting banks, airlines, media outlets across the world

[SorellaLaBefana]

11. "Wired" has as good a discussion of this as I've seen

...In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system started reporting devices showing Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). Shortly after, reports of disruptions started flooding in from around the world, including from the UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US: TV station Sky News went offline, and US airlines United, Delta, and American Airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all flights.

The widespread Windows outages have been linked to a software update from cybersecurity giant ​​CrowdStrike. It is not believed the issues are linked to a malicious cyberattack, cybersecurity officials say, but stem from a misconfigured/corrupted update that CrowdStrike pushed out to its customers...

Cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont posted on X that he has seen a copy of the CrowdStrike update that was issued and says the file isn’t properly formatted and “causes Windows to crash every time.” Beaumont says, in further posts, that it appears there isn’t an automated way to fix the issues, at least currently.

Brody Nisbet, the director of overwatch at CrowdStrike, also posted on X indicating the workaround fix the company had issued involves booting up Windows machines into safe mode, finding a file called “C-00000291*.sys,” deleting it, and then rebooting the machine normally...

https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-windows-outage-crowdstrike-global-it-probems/?_sp=4b5025ec-2d9e-49e8-b3e7-718834e26afc.1721384157622

Paywalled, but if you don't read Wired regularly, you might be able to access it as they allow for a few articles a month to be read for free

Why an update was pushed out apparently without testing is a mystery, but something which seems to be happening with more frequency.

Windoz seems especially sensitive to being broken by almost any sort of update. My main computer (W10) generally has issues following almost any MS update—admittedly the computer has a lot of crap on it—whilst my Apples and various Linuxi flavours are more robust.