CrowdStrike’s faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices, says Microsoft - eviltoast

Here are the details about what went wrong on Friday.

  • unfnknblvbl@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    This number seems quite low. My organisation alone would have had something like 3000 employee devices taken down. Since it happened on a day where most people WFH, there’s at least another thousand static devices in my building alone that may not have been in use at the time that will shit the bed tomorrow morning.

    The same thing applies to our much larger sister companies interstate. So that’s another 6,000 or so devices.

    The two largest energy retailers were affected too, so that’s another 5,000 devices at a conservative estimate.

    Then there’s all the self-service checkouts that went down across Australia. I have no idea how many there are, but if every Coles and Woolworths has ten of them, that’s another ~40,000 devices.

    That’s just the organisations that I am personally aware of as being affected in Australia and can get ballpark figures for.

    Obviously Microsoft are getting their figures from the auto-reportimg that happened on each crash, but it really does seem like it’s too low.

    It’s beyond time to diversify our IT infrastructure. Enough with sticking everything “in the cloud” and paying for software (and devices!!) we don’t own.

    • Chozo@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      So, those numbers all account for about 54,000 of the 8.5 million devices. Using fairly generous rounding, that still leaves approximately 8.5 million more devices.

      A million is a lot.

      • unfnknblvbl@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        Way to miss the point. That’s 54,000 that one person knows of across a small handful of organisations in one small country. I’m not even including the dozens more organisations I know were affected but can’t come up with a ballpark figure for.