On 19 July 2024, a faulty update to security software produced by CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity company, caused many computers and virtual machines running Microsoft Windows to crash, affecting a wide range of users, including airlines, airports, banks, hospitals, stock markets, and broadcasting services. The error was discovered and a fix was identified on the same day, but the outage continues to delay airline flights, cause problems in processing electronic payments, and disrupt emergency services. The incident has been characterised as the “largest IT outage in history”.
Southwest Airlines appears to be unaffected, possibly because they have critical systems running in Windows 3.1.
3.1 was a rock solid OS to be fair
WFW FTW
Stuff like this outage is upsetting because it reinforces these mentalities of using outdated stuff at a corporate level.
Like sure it looks good right now when everything is borked, but companies running 32 year old operating systems is why it takes me 5-10 business days to get money back for overpaying a prepay on gas. Or I can’t just pay my online bills and post, they need 4-6 days to post. Not just software mainframes either, my workplace hands out 6 year old dell workstations, with windows 10 forced onto it, so they chug and struggle because win10 is eating all 2gb of ram, wanting more, and running like ass all because some penny pincher doesn’t want to upgrade.
Anyone know how many endpoints they BSOD’d?
At the time of the incident, CrowdStrike said it had more than 24,000 customers[32], including nearly 60% of Fortune 500 companies and more than half of the Fortune 1,000.[33][34] The number of individual computers affected is hard to pinpoint.[35]
Definitely hard to determine a real number. 24,000 customers with 100 clients each? Some with several thousand each? Several million servers across some of the largest and most ubiquitous companies in America.
Long ago when I worked in enterprise IT management, the largest customers had ~500k endpoints under management, something like 90% Windows.
