Windows wipe out

[Ken Finch]

Yippee! Back on line again. What a disaster! This is what happens when you put everything in the same basket. Have only been able to gain access to the forum at 8 pm u k time. Fortunately I now use an I pad forinternet use.

[Graham Ritchie]

Glad to see it back

[Steve Klare]

Me too!

Yesterday was a weird kind of day: the World half-didn't work!

-started out normal: my oatmeal and coffee came out ok, but all the way to work I heard on the radio about entire airlines grounded and people stranded at airports.

I walked up to my building and grabbed the front door, and it was locked! They'd let me through the Gate, so I still had a job, but the locks are on a timer and they'd forgotten to unlock for regular business hours. My key-card still worked, so I went in.

I sat at my computer and it was mostly OK: everything that was local and the Internet still worked, but a lot of internal network-stuff was off line.

An afternoon meeting we had planned almost didn't happen because the information we were supposed to work with was off-line. Time-sheets were due but Payroll was basically back to parchment and quill pens.

My office next-door neighbor appeared in my door: he looked really concerned! He said "Did your PC come up?". His came up to a blue screen with a frowny-face and that's all she wrote! Depending on their work, people are barely to completely reliant on having a computer, and the blue-screen people kept wandering around just looking...lost! Some of them actually went home. (Hey, it was Friday in any case!)

Late in the afternoon I went out to my car and twisted the key, and it started as usual. (-after a day like yesterday I was almost grateful! 😉)

Of course S8 and 16mm did what exactly they were supposed to do, just as they always have!
.

[Osi Osgood]

I never have bothered getting all the "Windows updates", with the thinking that they ought to have given me a complete system when I bought it, but I'm pretty glad that my PC is always off line!

[Ed Gordon]

Yippee! Back on line again. What a disaster! This is what happens when you put everything in the same basket. Have only been able to gain access to the forum at 8 pm u k time. Fortunately I now use an I pad for internet use.

I was online most of Friday morning and did not experience any problems. The news was pretty vague about what was going on. Both film-tech.com sites worked just fine. Later in the day the 8mm site was not available, but the other side worked just fine. I don't know if the issues with the 8mm site were related to the global outage.

It appears that Microsoft Windows was a victim of a software update by someone else (divine justice? ).

Here is a nice summary from Reuters:

Explainer: What caused the global cyber outage?

By Martin Coulter and James Pearson


LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - A global tech failure disrupted operations across multiple industries on Friday, halting flights and upending everything from banking to healthcare systems.

WHAT HAPPENED?

CrowdStrike (CRWD.O), a U.S. cybersecurity company with a market value of about $83 billion, is among the most popular in the world, counting more than 20,000 subscribers around the world, the company's website shows.

According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients at 0530 GMT on Friday and reviewed by Reuters, its widely used "Falcon Sensor" software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.

George Kurtz, CrowdStrike's CEO, said in a post on X that CrowdStrike had deployed a fix for the issue. "This is not a security incident or cyberattack," he wrote.

However, it is not clear how easily the affected systems can be fixed remotely, as the "Blue Screen of Death" is causing computers to crash on reboot before they can be updated.

"This means in this state, devices can't be updated automatically, meaning manual intervention is required," said Daniel Card, of UK-based cybersecurity consultancy PwnDefend.

Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency, said the scale of the problem was huge.

"This is not unprecedented, but I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale. It has happened over the years, but this is one of the biggest. I think it’ll likely be short-lived because, the nature of the problem is actually quite simple".

"But it's very, very, very, very, big" he added.

WHY DID IT HAPPEN?

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and businesses alike have become increasingly dependent on a handful of interconnected technology companies over the past two decades.

Experts say the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.

To protect their computer networks from being breached by hackers, many businesses use a cybersecurity product known as Endpoint Detection and Response, or EDR, which runs in the background of corporate machines, or "endpoints".

Firms like CrowdStrike are able to use their EDR products as early warning systems for potential digital attacks, scan for viruses, and prevent hackers from gaining unauthorised access to corporate networks.

But, in this case, something in CrowdStrike's code is conflicting with something in the code that makes Windows work, and causing those systems to crash, even after rebooting.

"With the move to the cloud and with companies like CrowdStrike owning huge market shares, their software is running on millions of computers around the world," said Card.

WHO HAS BEEN IMPACTED?

The global tech outage has affected operations in different sectors internationally including at Spanish airports, U.S. airlines and Australian media and banks.

The governments of Australia, New Zealand, and a number of U.S. states are facing issues, while American Airlines (AAL.O), Delta Airlines (DAL.N), United Airlines (UAL.O), and Allegiant Air (ALGT.O grounded flights citing communication problems.

In Britain, Sky News, one of the country's major television news channels, was off air for hours on Friday before service was restored.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/w...2024-07-19/

[Lincoln Thorn]

You don't realize how much you visit or enjoy talking with friends until you can't anymore!

Very glad the site is back up and I can talk with everyone again! I couldn't get on the site for over a day.

[Osi Osgood]

Ahhhh, that's why the Forum was down that day? I thought Doug was just tinkering and upgrading again. It scares me as to how everything seems to be linked in together.