CrowdStrike’s last week incident was quite a headline, large enough that almost everyone who follows some sort of news, has heard about it. even my mom sent me a message asking if my job was affected by it. (no Mom, unfortunately, I had to work)
As someone who works in the engineering and IT field, although I could understand why this news was communicated as a Windows outage by the news agencies, I was quite surprised to see how people in the IT industry with experience reacted and commented on it.
Being doomed to have IT-related posts pushed up by the algorithm in different social media and LinkedIn, I have seen tens of different posts, articles, and videos about the incident, their view on it, and takeaways each of these users, or content creators had to share with the rest of the world.
Other than the true statement “don’t deploy to Prod on Friday”, which was tossed around in most of the comments, I’ve come to see a large number of expressed views by users on the internet, in a combative way directed toward Microsoft Windows:
Why were they using Windows?
A question that was raised sarcastically in many of these takeaways, views, and comments, going in one direction: to slam Windows and blame all the problems the world faced on Microsoft’s Operation System, which was something that surprised me the most, coming from people who claim they’re experts in the field.
Over the many years of working as an engineer, I’ve come across all types of computer users, each with a different taste. some religiously worship Apple (the iSheeps), and some others look down on anyone who uses anything but a dysfunctional Linux distro and those who are Microsoft fans.
This boggled my mind a lot. how much one’s taste can impact how biased one might be about truth, the actuality of something they claim to be an expert at. (if not, I’m deeply sorry for the companies that these technology experts work for)
For that reason, I decided to share my thoughts on this event in this blog post.
The CrowdStrike incident was just like any other tech incident, a bug in the software. a faulty software version that was shipped to Windows users.
Windows was the platform that CrowdStrike was running on, given the nature of what CrowdStrike claims to be, it did indeed have access to low-level of the OS, kernel level access, which in reality meant, it was close enough to the core of the OS, that it could crash it, intentionally or unintentionally.
Some people believed because this issue did not occur on Linux or Mac versions of this app, then the problem lay in Windows.
This issue had nothing to do with Windows, lets say if a bugged version of this software was shipped for Linux or Mac, guess what would happen then? You’re right, probably that system would crash too, with a kernel panic!
This simple understanding of how this incident happened was unfortunately missing in many of the comments about this incident.
Some other progressive IT experts were blaming Microsoft for not being able to handle such failure in the CrowdStrike app, gaslighting Windows for crashing instead of killing the app.
That goes back to the nature of this app, since CrowdStrike malware detection claims they prevent and detect Kernel Attacks, they had to have such low-level access to the OS, and Windows enabling this possibility, is not a lack of something.
So here are some notes I’d like to summarise:
- The root cause of the incident had nothing to do with Windows, Microsoft is not at fault. Media pushed for the “Windows Outage” headline, obviously because they would like more engagement. no one knew CrowdStrike before this.
- This could happen to any OS. because the faulty version was shipped to Windows, this does not mean Mac and Linux are resilient to such issues.
- You ask why Windows? because it works! because at an enterprise level, no commercial Linux company can offer the level of support and products Microsoft offers. Good luck getting support if something like this happens to your Free Linux machine!
I hope this was helpful for some of the folks who’d like to learn more about the connection of Windows and Microsoft to this incident.