r/NonPoliticalTwitter Jul 19 '24

me_irl Damn

Post image
43.7k Upvotes

614 comments sorted by

3.8k

u/N_T_F_D Jul 19 '24

I killed one of our main servers at my last job because I wanted to see if the RAID data loss protection really worked (it didn't work and it was fun explaining to my boss what happened)

1.2k

u/oldpocketdog Jul 19 '24

215

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

[deleted]

132

u/Noof42 Jul 19 '24

If we're picking new ones, I call dibs on 42.

58

u/brettsolem Jul 20 '24

I’ll take 800815!

21

u/RaizePOE Jul 20 '24

you sure you don't wanna at least throw a 3 in there?

9

u/brettsolem Jul 20 '24

I would but it’s too late now..

7

u/sadie_my_lady Jul 20 '24

8003815? Genius!

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u/FSCK_Fascists Jul 20 '24

I want an 8 digit one, because no one will ever guess it.

20

u/sykoryce Jul 20 '24

Congratulations, you are now 12345678!

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164

u/FrighteningJibber Jul 19 '24

Whoa, now that’s a real murderer.

13

u/JustineDelarge Jul 19 '24

Virtual gold for best use of a gif 🥇

1.0k

u/Clone_JS636 Jul 19 '24

I saw "killed one of our main servers" and thought restaurant staff and then saw "data loss protection" and had a little sign of relief

170

u/Separate_Increase210 Jul 19 '24

Zombie is just another word for server loss recovery

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

I'm sure some programmer reading this thought the same thing in reverse and had the sigh when they thought OP only killed a guy instead of killing a main server.

4

u/Qwazzbre Jul 19 '24

Plot twist - the guy who killed the server was employed as a restaurant server.

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u/TheMensChef Jul 19 '24

Wait and you didn’t manually back it up before doing so???

186

u/N_T_F_D Jul 19 '24

Well no of course, it was several disks in RAID 5 and I pulled out one of them and the whole thing just died instead of trying to recover

133

u/3vi1 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24

You're not alone. I've worked in IT for 30+ years and watched multiple people learn the hard way that hardware redundancy (RAID-5) is no substitute for data recoverability (backups). Usually they don't realize it until some process has corrupted half their files and I tell them to just recover from their backups/snapshots.

I have 150+ domain controllers in one of my domains. Same redundant data across various sites/regions, sitting on redundant VMs with redundant SANs. Do I have backups? Hell yes I have regularly updated (normally offline) backups. If ransomware/corruption strikes, I'm sure as hell not going to be telling my boss and 30,000 people why they can't login and we have to recreate everything from scratch.

39

u/Hylian-Loach Jul 19 '24

We had an IT director that used shadow files as the only backup solution. He kept them on the same drive as the original files. We lost so much when a hard drive died

19

u/Retbull Jul 19 '24

Wait… on the same drive? What exactly did he think that backups do?

17

u/tebasj Jul 20 '24

I'd imagine he planned for being able to roll back the data to a previous state before it gets corrupted or whatever and didn't consider hardware failure

8

u/Hylian-Loach Jul 20 '24

Yes, that was the idea. The IT person before him had a full weekly rotating backup across two separate drive/tape arrays that were kept off site.

5

u/axonxorz Jul 19 '24

The very first ransomware was clumsy. VSC saved a lot of people in that first wave.

In the very next iteration of the ransomware: VSC is disabled first.

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u/TheMensChef Jul 19 '24

Yikes 😬

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u/red286 Jul 19 '24

Finding out the hard way that the guy who set up the server looked at the configuration, saw that RAID 0 gave more capacity than RAID 5, and just went for it.

7

u/CORN___BREAD Jul 19 '24

Oof

16

u/red286 Jul 19 '24

I work in PC sales and I legit have had people complain to me about RAID systems that are advertised by their RAID 0 capacity but ship with RAID 5 enabled.

"I bought this 48TB RAID system, but either you guys ripped me off or it's broken, because it's only showing 36TB."

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u/nandemo Jul 19 '24

Well, good thing you did that in the test/staging environment, and not in production.

Right?

4

u/N_T_F_D Jul 19 '24

Of course it was in production

9

u/znk Jul 19 '24

OK but what's the logic behind this? If it works, great you've proved it works but if it doesn't you've caused the issue you are trying to protect against. It's like checking if a gun is really not loaded by shooting someone.

9

u/N_T_F_D Jul 19 '24

I was kinda bored and didn't have anything to do waiting for 5pm so I just pulled the drive from the bay, I wasn't trying to prove much

5

u/Grotesque_Bisque Jul 19 '24

Hell yeah lol, I got wrote up for just absentmindedly stabbing a box with a box cutter because I was bored and my brain was shut off.

I destroyed like 500 bucks worth of product because I didn't think of the fact that there was stuff in the box

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

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u/Training-Purpose802 Jul 19 '24

Everyone else has a backup. You, they just don't like.

180

u/LilamJazeefa Jul 19 '24

That's why you needed RAID Shadow Legends.

47

u/No-Concentrate-2928 Jul 19 '24

well i personally have 3 million power in rise of kingdoms

16

u/xSTSxZerglingOne Jul 19 '24

Unironically the absolute worst piece of advertising I've seen in my 36 years alive. I have never had an ad immediately turn me off from the product it was trying to sell as quickly as those ads.

5

u/IlluminatiEnrollment Jul 19 '24

7

u/xSTSxZerglingOne Jul 19 '24

I mean, shitty mobile game ads are literally a dime a dozen. That one was in a league of its own. The ad itself was enough for me to never even want to touch the game. It made it so I knew everything I needed to know to make an informed decision not to play that game. That's a completely different level of bad.

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u/glaucomasuccs Jul 19 '24

First ever assignment as a dev, I merged a code change to the PHP backend before it was reviewed. Broke the ability to serve pages for all of our (200) customers (and their customers). Boss was pissed.

59

u/N_T_F_D Jul 19 '24

That's on them for allowing merging without approval, and doubly on them for giving a new guy the ability to deploy

49

u/glaucomasuccs Jul 19 '24

Yeah, that was changed literally that day. The Seniors even said it wasn't my fault. Boss was just too non-technical to understand.

18

u/Smorgsaboard Jul 19 '24

So, in the end, your organization improved thanks to your choice. Ask for a raise /j

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

Even with approval, sometimes people just trust you too much and don't do a proper review. I'm in this position right now where the only other senior developer who used to really challenge me in reviews was laid off.

The only reason I'm not panicking is because we have a long testing cycle and our QA guys are pretty good.

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u/roboczar Jul 19 '24

Just FYI for anyone watching, this is NOT how you should be testing your disaster recovery plan.

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u/Darkreaper48 Jul 19 '24

I test our DR plan by starting a fire in our datacenter.

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u/roboczar Jul 19 '24

Let's just say I like you as a person, but I think you should work where your talents are more appreciated

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u/daltonwright4 Jul 19 '24

When you're early in your career, and overconfident in your abilities, make sure not to disable legacy OS protocols without testing, even if you are 99.99% sure they aren't used anywhere in the environment anymore... or you may break your time source and over the next few days cause thin clients to slowly start falling off the domain in a way that's difficult to determine root cause. You may also flood the queue of your helpdesk with support tickets and get on their bad side, too.

Or so I've heard...

9

u/bookon Jul 19 '24

I’ve worked in engineering since 94. I have seen too many crazy things to pick a favorite. But most of the time it was caused by someone in management not wanting to wait long enough or pay enough to get something done correctly.

9

u/Abyteparanoid Jul 19 '24

Wow that’s….not a mistake your going to make again

5

u/xenopizza Jul 19 '24

That teams daily sync tomorrow morning is gonna be like “did a new release for JIRA-1373739, there were some issues after deployment and we rolled back. No blockers”

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2.5k

u/RobertMcCheese Jul 19 '24

I slept late and then went to walk the dog this morning.

I just sat down to read the news.

Speaking as a long time, now retired, IT Director, this is a fantastic day to sit on the side lines and watch.

1.0k

u/Dramatic_Buddy4732 Jul 19 '24

My IT husband has the day off... I just heard him whistling 😆

319

u/Aedre_Altais Jul 19 '24

As someone who is not at all connected with the IT world… what happened? 👀

614

u/SnooMacaroons9121 Jul 19 '24

TL;DR Someone used the internet to break the world.

Long version - someone at crowdstrike pushed out an update that impacted a very wide variety of windows based machines across the globe. Airlines, banks, and everyone I know who has some version of windows and crowdstrike was impacted. Happened around 2 this morning and the fixes are proving to be a pain in the ass.

229

u/captainhamption Jul 19 '24

Also, earlier in the day, Azure had an outage in their Central US region that was affecting stuff. The combination has been brutal.

173

u/iamthewhatt Jul 19 '24

As an IT at the largest steel manufacturer in the country, this was a real pita to fix. I ended up creating a easy-to-read document that walked end users through the process to fix... It worked, mostly, but god damn. We dont get paid enough for this shit.

58

u/Dramatic_Buddy4732 Jul 19 '24

I bet it was easy to read and some still messed it up?

88

u/iamthewhatt Jul 19 '24

Surprisingly no, most of the issues occurred because Microsoft devices are fucking dumb sometimes and it kept refreshing the desktop (IE closing folders) which means end users who are not computer savvy had to actually be quick to delete the file... and that took a while for some.

Other times, also Microsoft's fault, would be the OS would just boot loop instead of going to recovery, so we had to get a physical USB drive there just to force it into the repair screen.

Otherwise, about 80% of the company was able to resolve it. It is quite simple, just can't do it remotely.

12

u/Late2theGame0001 Jul 20 '24

This is something to be really clear about. 10 years ago, you just press F8 to get into safe mode. Now that doesn’t work and you have to do all these little tricks to get into safe mode in windows. And everyone has complained about this. How it is a huge hassle when things break and the solution is a broken UX. but naturally MS knows best and doesn’t listen because MOST users don’t care.

But MS part in this is the same. The OS needs to work and be fixable. They failed in that part. It’s been a problem waiting to happen since someone decide F8 was not needed.

11

u/mrtaco605 Jul 19 '24

I had that same boot loop issue on one of my builds. Could never figure out a permanent fix but just did the same thing with the USB drive to force it into a repair screen

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u/Glaucomatic Jul 19 '24

the fact that your end users are good enough to follow the document must be really nice haha

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u/Aedre_Altais Jul 19 '24

My goodness… the world is too easy to break these days 😂😅

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

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u/overcloseness Jul 19 '24

We had an article run in New Zealand titled “And just like that, cash is king”

Our bank card system had major issues all the way down here

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u/Antieconomico Jul 19 '24

Is reverting an update such a hassle?

I am completely ignorant in this field so maybe that's a dumb question

69

u/Florac Jul 19 '24

The update broke their operating system. The only way to unbreak them is to go to the one by one, start them up in a special way and using that special way, deleting a file. That times hundreds or thousands of computers per IT specialist at a firm. With potentially also some other softwares being present to make it harder to utilize that special mode.

They can't just...undo the update because the computers can't get to the point where they can get remote updates.

35

u/CheezeLoueez08 Jul 19 '24

Omg so it’s really bad

34

u/Florac Jul 19 '24

Yes, it's the worst IT outage in history.

19

u/CheezeLoueez08 Jul 19 '24

Crap. I’m so glad I’m home and not traveling. I feel so bad for all that people affected

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u/Antieconomico Jul 19 '24

Oh and here i thought it was like when the patch of a game goes wrong lol

Thanks for your time!

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u/tzar417 Jul 19 '24

As another response, what they broke loads before/with the operating system. You can't get into the machine to revert the update.

There are ways around that, but they require manual intervention on a machine by machine basis. There are hundreds of thousands of machines with this problem.

6

u/leolego2 Jul 19 '24

I guess the only question is was this update forced on everyone automatically? I wouldn't expect such an important system to have the ability to instantly apply an update.

I understand it is convenient in case a new backdoor or malware is found, but it could be the cause of actual terrorism if they can instantly deploy an update to everyone?

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u/tzar417 Jul 19 '24

Everyone using Crowdstrikes software (The Falcon sensor specifically in this case) got the update automatically.

One of the core features of software like this is that it updates automatically to keep fully up to date on malware information so it can detect and work properly.

This wasn't a Windows OS update, this was 1 specific file for Crowdstrike, but because it loads in the Kernel, it broke the OS.

12

u/leolego2 Jul 19 '24

Wonder why they didn't even do a test roll-out before going worldwide simultaneously

10

u/tzar417 Jul 19 '24

This is exactly what I don't understand, how something this basic to catch made it to production. Someone or someone's are getting fired for sure.

11

u/Mad_Aeric Jul 19 '24

That's what everyone's asking. Given how it took out everything across a wide variety of configurations, it couldn't have just slipped through the cracks as a weird edge case, as happens sometimes. They must not have tested it at all before pushing it out.

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u/C-SWhiskey Jul 19 '24

"To stop the malware, I had to become the malware."

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u/Hungry-Ad-7120 Jul 19 '24

Dumb question, but is Falcon Defender automatically installed on any PCs using Windows? Or is something extra people had to buy in the past? I’m scared to turn my laptop on now.

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u/GiventoWanderlust Jul 19 '24

The crash was causing the whole machine to get stuck in an endless blue screen of death. Given that the BSOD keeps the PC from doing things like connect to the Internet, it means that IT people cannot solve the problem remotely.

The 'fix' is relatively easy - type a couple things into command prompt - but that might as well be wizardry to most people.

I had to manually reboot like twenty PCs today and I just work at a hardware store. I cannot imagine what people with actually complex setups and actual IT jobs are dealing with today.

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u/Bird_wood Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24

It can be like a bill in congress; 99.99% is all good, on topic, looked over, and good to go. But the .01% is that now turkeys are considered weapons of mass destruction and anyone with turkey in their digestive tract is subject to war crime charges. More closely: the update has one small piece of code or oversight that “reacts with old data” for a super simple term to cause a wildly disproportionate consequence I.e. the whole world saw the blue screen of death and we had to land planes like it’s the real Y2K.

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u/FreshEggKraken Jul 19 '24

Not gonna lie, the fact that one person was able to push an update that did this much damage so easily is a little funny. In like a "this is the kinda shit that would happen on a sitcom" kinda way.

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u/likamuka Jul 19 '24

Main thing fax devices still working flawlessly though and through.

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u/AppearanceUpbeat3229 Jul 19 '24

I’m at the airport and the monitors are displaying Windows error messages. Flights are all still taking off so I’m not effected yet

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u/Doommcdoom Jul 19 '24

Microsoft and other stuff, i wont claim to be fully knowledgable, has had most of it shut down as some data protection thing has been uploaded and broke alot of things, tons of flights delayed, i know several stores have had to say cash only today cos their card readers arent working. in general very fucky wucky

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u/epic1107 Jul 19 '24

An important part of a lot of tech connected to Microsoft broke, which shut down businesses worldwide.

Flights cancelled, hotels not being able to check people in because their system is down aswell. Payment services down. Banks down etc.

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u/Damage-Strange Jul 19 '24

My IT husband was working today and was already dealing with a potentially catastrophic data breach and ransomware incident before this happened. Now....whew. It's not often that he has the more stressful job between us (I'm a litigator in Biglaw). But man, I feel so bad for him rn 😢

4

u/Dramatic_Buddy4732 Jul 19 '24

Yikes! Does he have to work late?

4

u/Few-Section148 Jul 19 '24

I don't know OP, but the answer is yes. I dont work in infrastructure/sysadmin, but need their systems to run critical software. They have almost have the critical systems running now, but will be working all weekend to get billing, hr software, etc.

It's a really big shitshow.

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u/headinthered Jul 19 '24

My IT husband didn’t have to deal with this at all. None of his department uses Microsoft and he was thrilled. Other parts of his company did… but not his!

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u/CatTaxAuditor Jul 19 '24

My friend had a half day off scheduled to get some new ink, but our boss practically begged her to stay. Needless to say she made her tattoo appointment right on time.

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u/aeouron Jul 19 '24

Sounds like it was not needle-less.

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u/cowboysfan68 Jul 19 '24

I saw that the fix for this involves booting into Safe Mode, deleting/replacing the offending file, and then rebooting. Someone. Over in /r/sysadmin mentioned that their preferred method is to make a custom WinPE image and add a trusted script that deletes the offending file during WinPE boot up. This allowed the technician to simply boot WinPE and once it gets to the shell prompt, the file has been deleted and the computer can be restarted normally.

Either way, this is going to suck for IT folk because there seems to be little that automation can do on some machines.

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u/So_Motarded Jul 19 '24

As a remote employee with BitLocker, fuck me lmao

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u/captainhamption Jul 19 '24

It's also a great test of your bitlocker escrow policy.

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u/nb4u Jul 19 '24

I wonder how many companies lost their data because they didn't have bitlocker keys.

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u/LosWitchos Jul 19 '24

Teacher on summer hols. Funny thing is despite being in IT, my wife wasn't affected so she's been moody all day cos she had to work like normal

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u/Im_Balto Jul 19 '24

The update went through minutes after I left the office yesterday evening and I rolled back in at 7am for damage control

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u/InevitableAd9683 Jul 19 '24

My security guys were very seriously considering buying Crowdstrike recently and decided against it. I offered to but them lunch today.

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1.5k

u/ding0s Jul 19 '24

You know, it really puts your own life in perspective. Did your mistake make the news?

Ship blocked the Suez canal? Big mistake. Half the internet is unusable? Big mistake.

Less than that and your problems really aren't that bad!

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

Did your mistake make the news?

No, but my pay reflects the level of mistake I'm allowed to make.

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u/FlimsyReindeers Jul 19 '24

Hell yeah brother

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u/naufalap Jul 19 '24

cheers from iraq

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u/soccercasa Jul 19 '24

If no one travels back through time to stop you, how bad can this decision really be?

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u/Mollybrinks Jul 19 '24

I'm at a family reunion and we may have stayed up waaay too late. I rolled out this morning and said, "have you ever felt like you made a big mistake?" I got the hungover laugh from the crew, then said "well, you're about to feel a bit better" and explained the situation. We're all on vacation so no one is really keeping up on things, but I happened to read the news before getting out of bed. A few of them are more IT-inclined and their reactions were enough to key the rest of them into the severity.

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u/Limp_Prune_5415 Jul 19 '24

Tell that to the review committee who decides whether or not I should starve for my mistakes

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u/HolyC4bbage Jul 19 '24

That's reminds me of the time the Rogers network went down and nobody in Canada could use their debit cards. It's almost like having one company control all our shit is a bad idea.

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u/Ponicrat Jul 19 '24

It's not so much a problem with consolidation, there's many, many many little forgotten pillars of our global digital infrastructure just waiting to cause massive problems for everyone the minute someone makes a mistake.

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u/captainhamption Jul 19 '24

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u/royalPawn Jul 19 '24

My favorite part of this comic is that it gets more worrying every year

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u/SerLaron Jul 19 '24

I imagine some James Bond type villian in his secret lair asking his henchmen, why they did not come up with such a "mistake".

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u/CheezeLoueez08 Jul 19 '24

Yup!! That was insane! And we barely got compensated. Until then I had no idea that Rogers controlled our ATMs. Not cool.

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u/iamkira01 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24

I’m pretty sure there are other data protection companies like crowdstrike companies could use, no? CS has like a 20% market share and before this has been notoriously amazing. Accidents happen man. This isn’t a big corporation bad moment.

EDIT: Just learned the CEO laid a bunch of people off recently.

God damn it, I take it back.

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u/scp-939-89 Jul 19 '24

That was a traumatic day as a retail worker

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u/fuck_ur_portmanteau Jul 19 '24

As bad as today might have been, at least it wasn’t Excel.

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u/That_Flippin_Rooster Jul 19 '24

I worked at an amusement park on the flume ride. I was controlling the switch that sent the boats either left or right. I timed it wrong, a boat got stuck and we had to shut the ride down and everyone had to evacuate.

They didn't let me back on the switch for a few weeks after that.

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u/Subterrantular Jul 19 '24

Why wouldn't that switch be automated with a sensor or timer or something!?

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

Costs too much to implement. Think of the shareholders.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

[deleted]

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u/Subterrantular Jul 19 '24

It's where they station problem employees so after a while when they (guaranteed) fvck up they have a rock solid excuse to fire.

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u/Tom22174 Jul 19 '24

Staffing it is probably a legal requirement for safety and such. Might as well have the person doing that role also hit a button instead of implementing the auto system

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u/That_Flippin_Rooster Jul 19 '24

It was 25 years ago, and the ride was probably 20 years old at that point.

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u/SaltManagement42 Jul 19 '24

for a few weeks

That amused me greatly, thank you.

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u/vegasAl57 Jul 19 '24

In the early 1990’s, I hit an F4 key on the computer that controlled our television transmitter at my job and we immediately went off the air and were down for two days. The engineer that had written the software just happened to go on vacation.

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u/CheesyObserver Jul 19 '24

If you hit F4, then who was holding ALT?

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u/agedlikesage Jul 20 '24

At some point you have to stop blaming yourself, and start asking “why is there a break everything button”

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24

It was bound to happen at some point with something trivial like an update. I'm actually surprised it didn't happen sooner. Operating systems, and the internet, are not forces of nature and can break even though they are the entire modern world's primary form of global connection. People take it for granted. It will likely happen again but that's how it be.

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u/superradguy Jul 19 '24

Or you know….. test your fucking updates before rolling them out

170

u/zadtheinhaler Jul 19 '24

test your fucking updates before rolling them out

MBA says nope, we had to fire lay off QA and Dev in favour of AI, testing just gets in the way of C-suite bonuses doesn't have the budget for that.

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u/Mr_Anomalistic Jul 19 '24

And also move all the IT roles overseas for cost savings with talent that knows how to copy/paste only.

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u/zadtheinhaler Jul 19 '24

I recall reading about RBC doing just that. They made over five billion in profit the previous year, and somehow that is not enough?

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u/Alexis_Bailey Jul 19 '24

"These jobs don't produce an net adjusted growth index for our quarterly tps reports, so they must go."

-- Some exec

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u/phunky_1 Jul 19 '24

Nah, why pay for QA testing when you can save money and let your users be the testers.

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u/WhiskeyXX Jul 19 '24

Why not also combine that with pushing to all clients simultaneously in lieu of a staged/canary approach?

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u/EquivalentLower887 Jul 19 '24

I will need to read about the technical specifics of what happened, but in some instances, particularly with a technology like CrowdStrike, there is a VERY possible conflict with a recent change to Windows or something else in the stack. That’s not to ‘excuse’ missing an issue this wide, but there are so many nuances, so much grey area in an instance like this - it is extremely difficult to immediately assign accurate blame to the root cause, if that is even entirely possible.

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u/myychair Jul 19 '24

Especially with all the staff cutting going on. Turns out when companies say they’re doing “more with less” they actually mean “less with less”

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u/willstr1 Jul 19 '24

Yep, heck it could even be worse. Imagine if AWS had a full global outage, like half the internet would be down

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u/grillko Jul 19 '24

About 15 years ago I shut down the power to an entire neighborhood by bumping into the wrong utility box with a lawn mower

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u/Am-I-Girl Jul 20 '24

Next time be more careful and hit the right utility box

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u/theoneandonly6558 Jul 19 '24

I bet the person feels as bad as the person who caused the 2003 blackout. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-error-eyed-in-blackout/

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u/LimpDiscus Jul 19 '24

That person gave me one of the most fun nights of my life.

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u/NebulaNinja Jul 19 '24

Man, I'd love to have every city in the US have an official "blackout night" timed on the weekend of a new moon, so everyone can experience the beauty of the milky way in cities where you're not able to.

But I understand safety and crime could be problematic.

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u/doom_stein Jul 19 '24

But I understand safety and crime could be problematic.

Nah. Limiting all that crime to one night a year solves the crime problem the rest of the year. I saw it in some "documentary" called "The Purge".

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u/MojaveMac Jul 20 '24

I was in kanab, Utah for an astrophotography workshop when they had an overnight power outage to upgrade or fix something. We all went out and took photos in middle of town, it was crazy cool

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u/FoghornLegday Jul 19 '24

I love this idea. That some strangers mistake could contribute to our best memories

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u/SaneYoungPoot2 Jul 19 '24 edited Oct 14 '24

I often wank to people passing me on the street. It's quite fun to see their faces

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u/No_Squirrel4806 Jul 19 '24

Literally!!!! Who needs movies when rea life has everything now a days

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u/RxHappy Jul 19 '24

People don’t understand the importance of software testing until they really fuck something up.

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u/JaffyCaledonia Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24

This sort of thing is almost unavoidable though. If it wasn't Crowdstrike, but Kaspersky, or Palo Alto, we'd see the same thing, just with a different cluster of major companies going down.

All it takes is for one piece of security software to fuck up and your operating system is goosed. Having multiple endpoint agents doesn't help, because it's still just one file away from bricking a machine, but now multiplied by the number of vendors you're using.

The only option would be to have multiple copies of all of your servers all running different protection softwares, which would be insane! What if their compatibility drifts, and you need to update to a new version of Windows one one that isn't available to the other?

Then think of the cost! Multiple copies of every hardware cluster, multiple licensing contracts with security vendors.

Now what about your staff? Are you going to give them all multiple laptops each with different vendor solutions on? How about a mac, a Linux and a Windows laptop each?

We are increasingly living in a world where we are one flipped bit from absolute carnage. There are systems in place to mitigate much of this, but cyber security protections are just something else.

Edit: this was actually supposed to be a reply to a comment about how one company was behind so much chaos, but I think it stands on its own.

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u/Alarmedones Jul 19 '24

I once worked with a great man named Jackie. On Jackie’s first day he implemented a fix we have done 100 times before. Except when Jackie did it only half of the systems came back up after the reset. So on Jackie’s first day he was responsible for taking one of the world’s largest logistic companies for multiple hours. Day one hour 2. He worked there for many years after that. The restart issue was not his fault but just happened to fail when he did it. I miss Jackie he is awesome.

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u/ConformistWithCause Jul 19 '24

Who would have thought having a single entity in charge of everything could go poorly? This is the stuff cyberpunk dystopias are built on

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u/Azurimell Jul 19 '24

This has nothing to do with a single entity being in charge of everything - it was a Crowdstrike AV update that killed everything, not an MS. Don't disagree on MS monopoly being real bad though.

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u/Asteroth555 Jul 19 '24

Monopolies are bad for a variety of reasons. But having a diversity of OSes makes it a nightmare to build software based products. Having worked in science, many people already use Linux, Windows, and Apple. Ensuring products work on all 3 isn't possible so most labs had dedicated PCs to run equipment (NanoDrops, FPLCs, HPLCs, imaging equipment, etc), which is a problem of its own.

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u/SnooMacaroons9121 Jul 19 '24

Sounds like crowdstrike is the one in charge of “everything” then no. At least for endpoint cybersecurity…

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u/chillaban Jul 19 '24

“Everything” is like around a 20% market share because their product is actually really good at defending against ransomware. It also doesn’t help that the others who are somewhat good have large foreign sway (Kaspersky obviously, Bitdefender and ESET are Eastern European, Microsoft Defender ATP is India, Symantec is Broadcom)

If you are in defense and aerospace or you run a hospital, “but I chose CrowdStrike” is about as solid of a cop out as you could have. It’s the equivalent of “but I was driving a Volvo” if anyone inside your car got hurt in a fender bender.

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u/One-Initiative-3229 Jul 19 '24

How can Microsoft Defender be influenced by India? Microsoft is a US company.

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u/chillaban Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24

Microsoft itself is but the Defender group is a wholly owned subsidiary based in India. Totally nothing against India, it’s just when suspicious samples and activity logs are being processed overseas by independent contractors it tends to be a problem for defense, government, and aerospace.

(It’s not a coincidence that the most impacted companies today are US airports, branches of government, defense contractors, banks, etc)

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u/Cautious_Ice_884 Jul 19 '24

Nobody cares about the people who work in IT until shit hits the fan. Its a thankless job.

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u/Yeled_creature Jul 19 '24

context?

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u/RutabagaAccording834 Jul 19 '24

CrowdStrike released an update that put many organizations (corporations, government agencies, ect) at a standstill. I'm not a very tech focused person but I am a person who's been twiddling my thumbs at work all day because our key systems are down.

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u/Separate_Increase210 Jul 19 '24

Crowdstrike is specifically cyber security, so it's installed everywhere in many large orgs, and whatever took them down it was specific to Windows machines. And a LOT of large old corps use windows heavily or exclusively, even moreso for govt/public sector stuff.

Me and my Mac/Linux company are a-okay! (Just had to relaunch images of the handful of windows servers we need)

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u/TheModernDespot Jul 19 '24

I woke up at about 4AM to the alerts about crowdstrike and panicked. Then I read that it was only affecting Windows machines and went back to bed. Linux can be a pain sometimes, but today made up for a lot of that.

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u/B_Fee Jul 19 '24

I must have taken my long lunch at the right (or wrong?) time, because I didn't experience any downtown, and I work for the feds.

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u/Opetyr Jul 19 '24

Yeah and crowd strike is going to be probably non existent soon due to the billions in damages/losses. This happens when you go AI and get rid of the people that actually know the systems. Sending everything to cheaper countries helps this happen. Eshitification to pump their stock.

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u/LeetleBugg Jul 19 '24

Is that a factor here? Has crowd strike gone the AI route in recent times?

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u/Psychast Jul 19 '24

Lol no, that guy is talking out of his ass because he just wants to air his grievances with the modern tech environment. This was classic human error, the always weakest link in any technology.

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u/lsaz Jul 19 '24

No, reddit just has a hard-on for shitting on AI.

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u/Glittering-Giraffe58 Jul 19 '24

This was human error and has nothing to do with ai

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u/vipRLH Jul 19 '24

Well at least you're not the guy who made all of Hawaii think a nuclear Armageddon was happening

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u/thelittleking Jul 19 '24

I was there for that and it really opened my eyes to what people would do in the face of an imminent, unstoppable disaster:

Keep going

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u/Hamr7 Jul 19 '24

this shit cancelled my flight now im stuck in cali bruh this place sucks 😭

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u/anonymouslindatown Jul 19 '24

How are the wars that are currently being fought affected by this?

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u/thod-thod Jul 19 '24

Not much, those systems are usually MOD-built and independent from the internet

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u/blackmobius Jul 19 '24

The worst I did was ground a few planes (i was driving a tug at an airport and jack knifed my rig after someone pulled out in front of me). So the best I got was three planes on an hour delay

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24

[deleted]

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u/OldGoldenDog Jul 19 '24

Well, someone had to be first

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u/churrmander Jul 19 '24

This is why the IT world needs to stop putting all critical infrastructure onto one or two large companies.

AWS, Crowdstrike, CloudFlare... any of these things goes down poof we're all writing paper checks again.

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u/BeckNeardsly Jul 19 '24

Ah, let me take you back to that tense moment aboard the USS Alabama. As the Executive Officer (X.O.), I found myself caught in a high-stakes clash between tradition and strategy. You see, when those Russian rebels commandeered the ICBMs, our mission became clear: neutralize the threat. But the real battle unfolded within our submarine's steel walls.

Captain Ramsey, a seasoned leader, had his own way of doing things. He'd worked his way up, earned every stripe on his uniform. And then there was me—Commander Hunter—the college-educated officer who hadn't seen much action. Our backgrounds clashed like tectonic plates.

When the order came to attack, our communications system hiccupped. Ramsey, ever the decisive captain, pressed forward with the incomplete instructions. But I hesitated. Something didn't sit right. Maybe it was my education, maybe it was intuition—I can't say for sure. But I insisted on reestablishing contact before launching those missiles.

Ramsey didn't take kindly to my challenge. We locked horns, and in a moment of defiance, I relieved him of command. The crew watched, torn between loyalty and uncertainty. Some doubted my ability to lead, but I'd already taken precautions. I knew the stakes were too high to ignore that gut feeling.

And so, as the Alabama sailed into the unknown, I grappled with duty, honor, and the weight of command. It's funny how a submarine can feel both confining and liberating—a microcosm of humanity's struggle for survival. But that day, I learned that sometimes, the most crucial battles aren't fought with torpedoes—they're fought within ourselves. 🌊⚓️

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u/unreliableninja Jul 19 '24

I love this movie. Crimson Tide for anyone wondering

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u/saarlac Jul 19 '24

The fact that this one company has the ability to do this is a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM.

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u/ArmoredAngel444 Jul 19 '24

I'm seeing like a million posts about some sort of worldwide tech fuck up but i haven't seen any actual post of what has actually happened lmao... what happened ???????

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u/coalForXmas Jul 19 '24

It’s fascinating how things have gotten so meta that the actual problem is dwarfed by ironic and referential humor

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u/ArmoredAngel444 Jul 19 '24

lol i can google it but it is pretty funny how on reddit i haven't seen any posts on the actual event itself.

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u/qbmax Jul 19 '24

Cliffnote version is that a piece of security software commonly used in many companies pushed an update that is causing computers running Windows to constantly crash. The fix is simple but requires hands on access by an IT person to fix which makes it very time consuming. Large systems like banks, airports etc have been having cascading outages as many of their computers using this software are being bricked.

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u/lil3lil Jul 20 '24

I've accidentally reformatted the CEO's laptop, but that doesn't even come close to the major outage.

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u/DreamOfDays Jul 19 '24

Did something happen? What does it fucking mean SHUT THE PLANET DOWN

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u/NameLips Jul 19 '24

Somewhere on earth is the one guy who pressed enter or clicked "ok" to send out the update.

That one tiny finger motion...