This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
This is just like “what not to do in IT/dev/tech 101” right here. Every since I’ve been in the industry for literally decades at this point I was always told, even when in school, “Never test in production, never roll anything out to production on a Friday, if you’re unsure have someone senior code review” of which, Crowdstrike, failed to do all of the above. Even the most junior of junior devs should know better. So the fact that this update was allowed go through…I mean blame the juniors, the seniors, the PM’s, the CTO’s, everyone. If your shit is so critical that a couple bad lines of poorly written code (which apparently is what it was) can cripple the majority of the world…yeah crowdstrike is done.
It’s incredible how an issue of this magnitude didn’t get discovered before they shipped it. It’s not exactly an issue that happens in some niche cases. It’s happening on all Windows computers!
This can only happen if they didn’t test their product at all before releasing to production. Or worse: maybe they did test, got the error, and they just “eh, it’s probably just something wrong with test systems”, and then shipped anyway.
This is just stupid.
Can you imagine being the person that hit that button today? Jesus.