
Washington state impacted by Friday CrowdStrike crash.
My personal history in broadcasting goes back quite a way. I can remember when the news we used to receive came over the teletype. We would rip the paper off the machine and read it on the air. We played vinyl records, and our commercials were stored on tape cartridges that looked like 8 tracks. (remember 8 tracks?)
Today, almost everything is digital.
Our business model today doesn't just use the Internet, it depends on it. Even our phone system is Internet based. Even inside our building much of our communication is via e-mail and text.
What happened on Friday?
What happened on Friday (7/19) started at about midnight when a company called CrowdStrike pushed out a new update for their clients. I had heard the word CrowdStrike before in reference to a company on the Stock Exchange, but I had no idea exactly what CrowdStrike was.
According to wikipedia.com,
‘CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas. It provides cloud workload protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.’
Yes, a cybersecurity company. Providing software to protect data and unauthorized intrusion into systems by bad actors. Sometime around midnight on Friday they pushed out a new update for their software system to their clients and unfortunately that update was flawed and caused their end users no end of trouble. (Crash)
I had breakfast on Sunday morning with my son John who has some IT experience and he explained it to me and it kind of made sense. This explanation might help.
According to cnn.com.
‘This particular release was faulty as admitted by George Kurtz, the (CrowdStrike) CEO, and we then had to replace it,” DeWalt said. “But at that point, the damage had been done, and we now had to move into manual mode.” In manual mode, it takes a village to reboot computer devices and reload operating systems, DeWalt said, adding some of the companies “spent the entire night deploying thousands of people by hand reloading operating systems, starting servers back up again.’
This outage and the necessary rebooting of all these computers manually impacted hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people because CrowdStrike software is everywhere, major airlines, medical facilities, Police departments and more. There are a lot of people out there impacted by CrowdStrike and their software in one form or another.
Monday morning (7/22) on CNBC commentators were saying that there were people still stuck in airports as part of the fallout from this outage.
Some companies were impacted more than others. Our company, Town Square Media also uses CrowdStrike, but our operations were not impacted. Some think it was because our business just wasn't big enough.
The upside of this event, (if there is one.) Is that although the fix was labor intensive it was relatively easy.
The downside of this event is how easily it demonstrates our total dependence on Internet connectivity and digital security.
It wasn't just the airlines that had problems this Friday. It was government agencies across the United States including Washington state. And not just Washington state agencies were impacted by this outage. Grant, Chelan and Douglas Counties all experienced problems.
Living in the digital age is great. (When it works.)
When it doesn't work. It's good to have an analog backup.
I have no idea how that would work.
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