In the late 1990s, IT experts feared a theoretical “Y2K bug” would trigger widespread technology failures as the calendar changed from 1999 to 2000. With so many systems linked around the globe, many feared one coding error could end it all. Thankfully, that tech-pocalypse never arrived, but a similar cascading failure finally did last month.
On July 19, cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike pushed a small update to systems using its wildly popular Falcon platform. The company realized it contained a coding error and sent a corrected update just 79 minutes later. By then, it was too late. The result wasn’t exactly Y2K, but it created what many consider the largest IT outage in history.
A Y2K outage might have delayed emails or access to an ATM, but an outage today affects everything from medical care to our food supply to our power grid.
CrowdStrike Falcon is widely used by organizations across many large and small industries. The company’s reputation was excellent, thanks to a decade of identifying sophisticated cybercriminals from countries such as China, North Korea, and Russia. This made its platform nearly ubiquitous, which only heightened the damage caused by its fatal update. As did its tight integration with Microsoft Windows OS.
The company had inadvertently introduced a logic error, crashing not only Falcon but entire Windows systems. Although CrowdStrike quickly corrected the problem, many of the systems had shut down for good. You can’t update an offline computer. […]
— Read More: www.theblaze.com
