- Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
- The airline canceled more than 4,000 flights in the wake of the outage, which was caused by a botched CrowdStrike software update and took thousands of Microsoft systems around the world offline.
- Bastian, speaking from Paris, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”
It’s sort of 90% of one and 10% of the other. Mostly the issue is a crowdstrike problem, but Microsoft really should have it so their their operating system doesn’t continuously boot loop if a driver is failing. It should be able to detect that and shut down the affected driver. Of course equally the driver shouldn’t be crashing just because it doesn’t understand some code it’s being fed.
Also there is an argument to be made that Microsoft should have pushed back more at allowing crowdstrike to effectively bypass their kernel testing policies. Since obviously that negates the whole point of the tests.
Of course both these issues also exist in Linux so it’s not as if this is a Microsoft unique problem.
There’s a good 20% of blame belonging to the penny pinchers choosing to allow third-party security updates without testing environments because the corporation is too cheap for proper infrastructure and disaster recovery architecture.
Like, imagine if there was a new airbag technology that promised to reduce car crashes. And so everyone stopped wearing seatbelts. And then those airbags caused every car on the road to crash at the same time.
Obviously, the airbags that caused all the crashes are the primary cause. And the car manufacturers that allowed airbags to crash their cars bear some responsibility. But then we should also remind everyone that seatbelts are important and we should all be wearing them. The people who did wear their seatbelts were probably fine.
Just because everyone is tightening IT budgets and buying licenses to panacea security services doesn’t make it smart business.
In this case, it’s less like they stopped wearing seatbelts, and more like the airbags silently disabled the seatbelts from being more than a fun sash without telling anyone.
To drop the analogy: the way the update deployed didn’t inform the owners of the systems affected, and didn’t pay attention to any of their configuration regarding update management.
The crowdstrike driver has the boot_critical flag set, which prevents exactly what you describe from happening
