Delta CEO says CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage cost the airline $500 million
Delta CEO says CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage cost the airline $500 million
Bastian told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, "We have no choice."
- 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.”
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Why do news outlets keep calling it a Microsoft outage? It's only a crowdstrike issue right? Microsoft doesn't have anything to do with it?
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
Yeah I know but booting in safe mode disables the flag so you can boot even if something is set to critical with it disabled. The critical flag is only set up for normal operations.
The answer is simple: they have no idea what they are talking about. And that is true for almost every topic they are reporting about.
But... the BSOD!
It was a Crowdstrike-triggered issue that only affected Microsoft Windows machines. Crowdstrike on Linux didn't have issues and Windows without Crowdstrike didn't have issues. It's appropriate to refer to it as a Microsoft-Crowdstrike outage.
Funny enough, crowdstrike on Linux had a very similar issue a few months back.
It's similar. They did cause kernels to crash. But that's because they hit and uncovered a bug in the ebpf sandboxing in the kernel, which has since been fixed
Are they actually shipping kernel modules? Why is this needed to protect from whatever it is they supposedly protect from?
I guess microsoft-crowdstrike is fair, since the OS doesn't have any kind of protection against a shitty antivirus destroying it.
I keep seeing articles that just say "Microsoft outage", even on major outlets like CNN.
Microsoft did have an Azure outage the day before that affected airlines. Media people don't know enough about it to differentiate the two issues.
To be clear, an operating system in an enterprise environment should have mechanisms to access and modify core system functions. Guard-railing anything that could cause an outage like this would make Microsoft a monopoly provider in any service category that requires this kind of access to work (antivirus, auditing, etc). That is arguably worse than incompetent IT departments hiring incompetent vendors to install malware across their fleets resulting in mass-downtime.
The key takeaway here isn't that Microsoft should change windows to prevent this, it's that Delta could have spent any number smaller than $500,000,000 on competent IT staffing and prevented this at a lower cost than letting it happen.
Delta could have spent any number smaller than $500,000,000 on competent IT staffing and prevented this at a lower cost than letting it happen.
I guarantee someone in their IT department raised the point of not just downloading updates. I can guarantee they advise to test them first because any borderline competent I.T professional knows this stuff. I can also guarantee they were ignored.
Also, part of the issue is that the update rolled out in a way that bypassed deployments having auto updates disabled.
You did not have the ability to disable this type of update or control how it rolled out.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/falcon-content-update-preliminary-post-incident-report/
Their fix for the issue includes "slow rolling their updates", "monitoring the updates", "letting customers decide if they want to receive updates", and "telling customers about the updates".
Delta could have done everything by the book regarding staggered updates and testing before deployment and it wouldn't have made any difference at all. (They're an airline so they probably didn't but it wouldn't have helped if they had).
Delta didn't download the update, tho. Crowdstrike pushed it themselves.
yes, the incompetence was a management decision to allow an external vendor to bypass internal canary deployment processes.
If you own the network you can prevent anything you want.
Competent IT staffing includes IT management
Honestly, with how terrible Windows 11 has been degrading in the last 8 or 9 months, it's probably good to turn up the heat on MS even if it isn't completely deserved. They're pissing away their operating system goodwill so fast.
There have been some discussions on other Lemmy threads, the tl;dr is basically:
- Microsoft has a driver certification process called WHQL.
- This would have caught the CrowdStrike glitch before it ever went production, as the process goes through an extreme set of tests and validations.
- AV companies get to circumvent this process, even though other driver vendors have to use it.
- The part of CrowdStrike that broke Windows, however, likely wouldn't have been part of the WHQL certification anyways.
- Some could argue software like this shouldn't be kernel drivers, maybe they should be treated like graphics drivers and shunted away from the kernel.
- These tech companies are all running too fast and loose with software and it really needs to stop, but they're all too blinded by the cocaine dreams of AI to care.
I don’t know that Microsoft has OS goodwill. People use it because the apps are there, not because Windows has a good user experience.
The driver is wqhl approved, but the update file was full of nulls and broke it.
Microsoft developed an api that would allow anti malware software to avoid being in ring 0, but the EU deemed it to be anti competitive and prohibited then from releasing it.
I think what I was hearing is that the CrowdStrike driver is WHQL approved, but the theory is that it's just a shell to execute code from the updates it downloads, thus effectively bypassing the WHQL approval process.
Because Microsoft could have prevented it by introducing proper APIs in the kernel like Linux did when crowdstrike did the same on their Linux solution?
Its sort of like calling the terrorist attack on 911 the day the towers fell.
Although in my opinion, microsoft does have some blame here, but not for the individual outage, more for windows just being a shit system and for tricking people into relying on it.