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.
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.