Not going to be a productive day on computers

The world has suffered today from two separate outages of computers.

Early this morning there were reports that Microsoft 365 was failing around the world. This outage was caused by some system failures in Microsoft's Azure cloud. As is usually the case, this outage was caused by human error - a misconfiguration of their cloud implementation. 

Around the same time that Microsoft fixed their problem with Azure there were many reports of outages of Windows computers crashing with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. This has been a much more serious problem as computers around the world have mysteriously started failing at the same time. This issue appears to be caused by a broken update in a Clloudstrike security product. Cloudstrike is used to defend computers in many business environments, so having all of those computers fail simultaneously has caused massive headaches for system administrators around the world. Concerningly, the outages are affecting airlines, health systems, and many other critical businesses. This is an interesting paradox where software intended to protect computers from outages has caused an outage worse than an external attack could cause. 

The problem is made worse because although the means of recovery is straightforward (boot the system into safe mode and remove the file with the bad update, then reboot), this is a difficult task when thousands of computers need to have this done, and many of them are only remotely accessible. Full recovery from this problem will take at least several days.

Fortunately, the issue only affects Windows computers and only those that have the Crowdstrike software installed. Linux and Macintosh computers are not affected, so much of the infrastructure of the internet is humming along. 

This may take some time for recovery.