Thoughts On The Global Tech Outage?

Kai Robinson

TinkerDifferent Board President 2023
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Sep 2, 2021
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To sum up my day working at an msp: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

*inhales*

... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
 
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2112st

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Oct 8, 2023
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Northeastern New Jersey, USA
(whistles innocently)

Opps.png
 
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Certificate of Excellence

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Nov 1, 2021
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My 75&81 y/o parents were flying back from Alaska when this F’d everything up. Initially it grounded their plane for a little over an hour which they thought would make them late to their connecting gate but their pilot was a goat & pushed the heck out of that airbus making up about 45 minutes of that delay in the air so they could make their connecting flight in Vancouver & back into the States.

On a humorous side note, the AI system that Canadia used to verify passports would not accept my mom’s brand new passport telling her to take off her mask LOL. 😂
 
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We had supermarkets closing down here (because their cash registers wouldn't work anymore) and our family doctor was unable to retrieve appointments / medical charts. Only professional working in town was probably our dentist, because the old lady assistant still keeps track of appointments with a pencil on a paper calendar :-D

That's what you get when you connect everything to the net and keep pushing for centralization, everybody using the same software packages etc. Recently our local hospital had been hacked and the internal IT was down for over a week, which is a disaster for all the doctors, nurses and patients.

It's digitization without brains, connecting up everything without thinking about the impact and building things up on the perception that "there'll always be a connection to the net". I hope they learn from it, though I have my doubts.
 

bakkus

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Mar 18, 2022
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I find it weird that many are calling it a "Windows" or "Microsoft" debacle/problem/issue/whathaveyou.
The problem was the 3rd party vendor of security software Crowdstrike.
If you're not a large-scale enterprise spending millions in license fees to Crowdstrike, your Windows installation is fine.
 

Yoda

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Jan 22, 2023
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Partly it’s the media being intellectually lazy when reporting on things they don’t understand all that well, but when a major event like this crashes Windows systems but not macOS or Linux, even though it’s not simply a Microsoft/Windows problem, they are not being entirely unfair in reporting it as such.

It is, after all, Microsoft’s choices and policies which created a platform into which customers have to pour money for 3rd-party security solutions, and live with a cycle of never ending patches and fixes. It’s also their choice to halt pre-notification of monthly patches so vendors could prepare and avoid conflicts in their products through pre-flight testing.

CrowdStrike products on other platforms didn’t fail, but unfortunately since theirs is an aggressive security suite, it’s increasingly popular across the board. Widespread failures are therefore going to happen, and impact a lot more people than merely those with a BSOD of their own to contend with.

I’d say there are lessons to be learned from this about growing dependencies on connective devices and the way that creates widespread havoc from narrow mistakes. Unfortunately, it isn’t likely there will be much other than finger pointing and lawsuits. There’s a lot of the first already, and will be no shortage of the second pretty soon.
 
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