Woke up to the news the news that Crowd Strike killed bunch of IT infrastructure. We weren't using that POS software in our company so the work day was not bad for me. I was talking to a co-worker about this news. I mentioned 'Crowd Strike is going go broke over this'. He said, 'No they won't.' "Won't they get sued into the ground for this." "Microsoft hasn't been sued over its bad updates."
I do a quick search to see if I could prove him wrong. All I could find is individuals taking Microsoft to court for forcing updates but no corporations have. It appears the software EULAs are so legally airtight that if a software update costs your company millions or billions...tough shit and suck it up.
Crowd Strike did several bad IT practices this update.
- Deploying on a friday (lol)
- not testing the update deployment (the update itself could've been fine but the update server might have corrupted the file)
- not doing a staged update
- the software probably makes it difficult or impossible to defer updates
As well Microsoft is still Microsofting with its driver BSODs.
I'm doubtful that either Crowd Strike or Microsoft will be held to account for the billions of dollars lost and millions of people that had their day ruined over this.
Basically, software companies are like vaccine companies and they are immune to legal liability.
Have a good weekend, unless you're in IT.
Great insights, but I do think they’re going to get sued into the ground, atleast crowdstrike if not microsoft. Crowdstrike’s stock value has already plummeted, down 20% over a month, and the cost to many of these companies is just going to be too much to eat.
A MONUMENTAL fuck up. The details will be interesting as they emerge.
They're likely to face suits for loss of business. I doubt any purchase agreement covers "we're going to brick your machines".
Not to mention how critical some of these systems are. I was talking to a nurse who said her dialysis wing was stuffed to the gills today because one of the other local hospitals was totally out of service over this.
Basically every industry with a large workforce was affected by this, to varying degrees. No way this just gets swept under the rug “cost of doing business” style.
Whats more, this doesn’t exactly feel like an accident. I mean, obviously, it was a monumental fuck up. But what if it was more than that? Qui bono?
They copped to the bad update. It's Crowdstrike, they're basically a subsidiary of the DNC. If they'd had the slightest bit of an excuse they'd have grabbed for it.
Unforced errors are the hallmark of a decaying society.
Yes I do remember that. That was a fun week.
Stock values always plummet when something like this happens but they recover, too.
Has anyone ever had to face consequences when something like this has happened? IIRC there have been similar updates that broke stuff on a large scale with Windows. There have also been large scale outages because some service that everyone and their grandmother uses went down. Don't remember any major consequences.
Airlines will be stuck with the bills depending on jurisdiction where they have to reimburse travelers even if it's not their fault. Other than that, nobody is going to talk about it in a week.