There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.
All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It's all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.
Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.
Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We'll see if that changes over the weekend...
Exactly. You don't know what the vulnerabilities are, but the vendors pushing out updates typically do. So stay on top of updates to limit the attack surface.
Major releases can wait, security updates should be pushed as soon as they can be proven to not break prod.
You posted this 14 hours ago, which would have made it 4:30 am in Austin, Texas where Cloudstrike is based. You may have felt the effect on Friday, but it's extremely likely that the person who made the change did it late on a Thursday.