Most supermarkets, banks and businesses across Australia and the world went into ‘meltdown’ on Friday afternoon.
At the Southern Riverina News office computers shut down without warning and access to all our software was severed.
We soon learned we were not the only ones, with a global software update affecting multiple users.
As a cashless society, the inability to use baking services in multiple locations around the community wreaked havoc for some.
But some local businesses reported no impact from the outage at all.
Nathan Vincent, who provides IT support to the Southern Riverina News and other McPherson Media Group newspapers, said the outage occurred about 3pm, as an update was rolled out to the CrowdStrike platform.
“Every device downloaded the update, which included a small 4KB file that caused ‘the blue screen of death’ (BSOD),” Mr Vincent said.
“This triggered an endless reboot loop where Windows would briefly start before encountering the BSOD again.
“Although CrowdStrike removed the update, the damage was already done.
“Windows devices couldn’t stay online long enough to receive the command to remove the file, which is why the problem was so widespread.
CrowdStrike then released a workaround on its platform for manually removing the affected file, but this required physical access to each machine. As a result, IT departments faced a massive effort to address and fix the issue.“
Mr Vincent said early reporting suggested the issue may have been linked to a Mircrosoft update earlier the same day.
He said while this caused some outages for users, it was not as widespread.
“Fortunately, at this stage, it appears to have been a software update to the CrowdStrike platform and not a malicious attack.
“However, we have seen similar situations before where a security platform has been hacked, and malware has been distributed to all devices using the software.”