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...
crowdstrike sent a corrupt file with a software update for windows servers. this caused a blue screen of death on all the windows servers globally for crowdstrike clients causing that blue screen of death. even people in my company. luckily i shut off my computer at the end of the day and missed the update. It's not an OTA fix. they have to go into every data center and manually fix all the computer servers. some of these severs have encryption. I see a very big lawsuit coming...
. they have to go into every data center and manually fix all the computer servers
Do they not have IPMI/BMC for the servers? Usually you can access KVM over IP and remotely power-off/power-on/reboot servers without having to physically be there. KVM over IP shows the video output of the system so you can use it to enter the UEFI, boot in safe/recovery mode, etc.
I've got IPMI on my home server and I'm just some random guy on the internet, so I'd be surprised if a data center didn't.
Sometimes there are options that are reasonable for individual users that don't scale well to enterprise environments.
Also, the effectively gives attackers a secondary attack surface in addition to the normal remote access technologies that require the machine to be up and running to work.