IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from the faulty CrowdStrike update. One spoke to The Register to share what it is like at the coalface.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the administrator, who is responsible for a fleet of devices, many of which are used within warehouses, told us: “It is very disturbing that a single AV update can take down more machines than a global denial of service attack. I know some businesses that have hundreds of machines down. For me, it was about 25 percent of our PCs and 10 percent of servers.”
He isn’t alone. An administrator on Reddit said 40 percent of servers were affected, along with 70 percent of client computers stuck in a bootloop, or approximately 1,000 endpoints.
Sadly, for our administrator, things are less than ideal.
Another Redditor posted: "They sent us a patch but it required we boot into safe mode.
"We can’t boot into safe mode because our BitLocker keys are stored inside of a service that we can’t login to because our AD is down.
80% of our machines were hit. We were working through 9pm on Friday night running around putting in bitlocker keys and running the fix. Our organization made it worse by hiding the bitlocker keys from local administrators.
Also gotta say… way the boot sequence works, combined with the nonsense with raid/nvme drivers on some machines really made it painful.
It might be CrowdStrike’s fault, but maybe this will motivate companies to adopt better workflows and adopt actual preproduction deployment to test these sort of updates before they go live in the rest of the systems.
I know people at big tech companies that work on client engineering, where this downtime has huge implications. Naturally, they’ve called a sev1, but instead of dedicating resources to fixing these issues the teams are basically bullied into working insane hours to manually patch while clients scream at them. One dude worked 36 hours straight because his manager outright told him “you can sleep when this is fixed”, as if he’s responsible for CloudStrike…
Companies won’t learn. It’s always a calculated risk, and much of the fallout of that risk lies with the workers.
Sounds so illegal, that it makes labour authoririty happy
Is it illegal? I’m not American so I have no idea if there are laws in your country against on-call maximum hours.
- It’s not about oncall, they are literally in the office
- See 1
- Not sure about America, but it is very illegal in Russia.
That dude should not have put up with that.
Just a thought from experience: Be wary of any critical products and/or taking a job from a company run by an accountant. CrowdStrike CEO… accountant!
Accounting firms are an obvious exception.
Sounds like the best time to unionize
To preface, I want to see a tech workers union so, so bad.
With that said, I genuinely don’t believe that most tech workers would unionize. So many of them are brainwashed into thinking that a union would dictate all salaries, would force hiring to be domestic-only, or would ensure jobs for life for incompetent people. Anyone that knows what a union does in 2024 knows that none of that has to be true. A tech union only needs to be a flat fee every month, guaranteed access to a lawyer with experience in your cases/employer, and the opportunity to strike when a company oversteps. It’s only beneficial.
Even if you could get hundreds of thousands of signatories, the recent layoffs have shown that tech companies at the highest level would gladly fire a sizable number of employees if it meant stamping out a union. As someone that has conducted interviews in big tech, the sheer numbers at peak of people that had applied for some roles was higher than the number of active employees in the whole company. In theory, Google could terminate everyone and replace them with brand-new workers in a few months. It would be a fucking mess, but it (in theory) shows that if a Google or Apple decided that it wanted no part of unions they could just dig into their fungible talent pool, fire a ton of people, promote people that stayed, and fill roles with foreign or under-trained talent.
I feel you with this. They do not see themselves as workers. Thank you for the preface.
Agreed, sadly to many there is still the view of tech being a meritocracy, and that they’re in FAANG because of their hard work over everything else, so fuck everyone else. Naturally, many change their tune once their employer actions regressive policies, but it’s surprising how many people just have zero understanding of what a union does. They see cop shows or The Wire and assume it’ll be like the unions there…
All true… All sad. Time to snap some fools to reality I guess
We can’t boot into safe mode because our BitLocker keys are stored inside of a service that we can’t login to because our AD is down.
Someone never tested their DR plans, if they even have them. Generally locking your keys inside the car is not a good idea.
I remember a few career changes ago, I was a back room kid working for an MSP.
One day I get an email to build a computer for the company, cheap as hell. Basically just enough to boot Windows 7.
I was to build it, put it online long enough to get all of the drivers installed, and then set it up in the server room, as physically far away from any network ports as possible. IIRC I was even given an IO shield that physically covered the network port for after it updated.
It was our air-gapped encryption key backup.
I feel like that shitty company was somehow prepared for this better than some of these companies today. In fact, I wonder if that computer is still running somewhere and just saved someone’s ass.
I didnt know so many servers still run windows.
I’m the corporate world, very much Windows gets used. I know Lemmy likes a circle jerk around Linux. But in the corporate world you find various OS’s for both desktop and servers. I had to support several different OS’s and developed only for two. They all suck in different ways there are no clear winners.
It’s not just a circle jerk in this case. Windows is dominant for desktop usage but Linux has like 90% of the server market and is used for basically all new server projects.
Paying for Windows licensing when it doesn’t benefit you, it’s silly, and that’s been realized for years.
