IT professionals across the globe have reacted in surprise and horror at the scale of the Crowdstrike outage as problems continue to mount.
Affected users and IT professionals have taken to social media to express their thoughts on the ongoing outage. One of those was Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director and the creator of HaveIBeenPwned, a site that checks if your personal information has been breached.
Troy Hunt took to Twitter/X to explain the nature of the problem. Since Crowdstrike is a form of computer security similar to antivirus, it needs to operate in a ‘privileged’ space on a computer: “They have very broad-reaching control in order to detect and mitigate risks. That also means that if something goes wrong with an update, it’s able to catastrophically nuke your machine,”
Hunt went on to say: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history.”
Look at all those BSoDs 😮 https://t.co/Kb1BX5s9LZ
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 19, 2024
Dexerto reached out for comment to IT Professional Richard Crawshaw, who said: “Two things occur to me following this: A) another reason to add to the host of others for a country NOT to go cashless. B) embedding third-party software deep in an Operating System is a BAD idea.”
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Sysadmin and network operations professional Colin Childs on BlueSky had thoughts on what it would take to recover from the problems, saying: “Unless I’m missing it, I can’t come up with a way that the workaround or eventual fix can be rolled out without manual intervention on almost every impacted system. This is going to be long and costly to recover from.”
Security consultant Alec Muffett, also wrote on Bluesky to express frustration not just at Crowdstrike, but at Windows and Microsoft: “I can’t defend the continued use of an operating system where so much of the fundamental core integrity needs to be outsourced to random third parties.”
It looks like the road to recovery from this issue will be a difficult one, and the burden will fall on IT professionals who might have some long days ahead.
