[HN Gopher] CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 com...
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       CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4B
        
       Author : Terretta
       Score  : 133 points
       Date   : 2024-07-24 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | lnxg33k1 wrote:
       | So, here's 10 bucks, we good?
        
         | throwaway240403 wrote:
         | Worse than than, 10$ gift card
        
           | lawn wrote:
           | I heard it had been withdrawn?
        
             | metadat wrote:
             | _CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry
             | for outage_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41058261
             | (129 comments)
             | 
             | According to the discussion in the thread, you're correct.
             | Also, it was a $10 giftcard for .. uber eats. Where you
             | can't get anything for less than ten bucks.
        
               | lawn wrote:
               | That's truly some dark comedy.
        
               | rqtwteye wrote:
               | These are deeply insulting. My company sometimes sends
               | out $10 cards for DoorDash. To actually get something I
               | would have to add at least another $10 myself.
               | 
               | I wonder if Uber Eats and DoorDash give these out for
               | free to companies as promotion. I bet most people who use
               | the cards spend another $20 or more.
        
               | ck45 wrote:
               | Even worse, the vouchers got canceled and can't be
               | redeemed.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | I guess it's easier to buy X number of gift cards and
               | allow that company to deal with the individuals rather
               | than paying each customer $10 individually.
               | 
               | Also, does the IT manager get that giftcard? Do they
               | share it with the rest of the team? Does the CTO get the
               | card and shares it with the rest of the C-suite. What's
               | the proper way of handling that other than reject with a
               | harsh laugh in their face at the offer?
        
         | bluSCALE4 wrote:
         | Or a year membership of geek squad.
        
       | bdcravens wrote:
       | Bankruptcy coming ....
        
         | 7thaccount wrote:
         | I'm curious if that will actually happen as these companies
         | need to use something to check their compliance box.
        
           | femiagbabiaka wrote:
           | Correct. To move away there have to be alternatives. Who here
           | is building the alternative?
        
           | SoftTalker wrote:
           | Yeah I think it will be quickly forgotten. Most people
           | already have where I work. It was just another IT fail in a
           | long line of them.
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | This was what I kept thinking about when it happened. Every
             | job I've ever had has had days of some system or other
             | being down for some amount of time. Hell, even WFH has put
             | me offline when I've had extended power outage after a
             | major storm. The only thing different about this was that
             | it was all the companies at the same time because of one
             | glitch. For all of the companies that did not use this
             | system, it was just another day of the week.
        
           | xyst wrote:
           | There are competitors in this space. Palo Alto Networks comes
           | to mind. Whether competitors have same issues as ClownStrike
           | remains to be seen.
        
             | AmericanChopper wrote:
             | The two problems I see with this story are
             | 
             | 1) These types of products cause incidents all the time,
             | this was just a very high impact one that happened to
             | affect everybody all at once.
             | 
             | 2) Their product is very good compared to the competitors.
             | 
             | All products in this space are black boxes, but CS is one
             | of the least black-boxy, the alerts it produces are decent,
             | the tooling is comes with is especially good (from an
             | operator perspective), and the reporting it produces is
             | exactly the sort of thing decision makers in big enterprise
             | love to see.
             | 
             | I doubt there's going to be much churn from this,
             | definitely not an existential amount. As much as I
             | personally can't stand the organisation, I think they
             | absorbed most of the bad press on behalf of all the service
             | providers they took offline.
        
         | hnlmorg wrote:
         | Unlikely. Big enterprises are slow to change and switching
         | provider would be a _massive_ change.
         | 
         | They're more likely to investigate running two platforms
         | simultaneously or, more likely, talk to competitors purely as a
         | bargaining chip to negotiate a bigger discount for the next
         | renewal.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | You can sue your provider and still continue to use that
           | provider. Look at the Apple vs Samsung lawsuits as an example
        
             | hnlmorg wrote:
             | The Apple vs Samsung situation is very different to this
             | but I do take your point.
             | 
             | The end result is still the same though, CrowdStrike will
             | lose a lot of income and confidence but they're not going
             | out of business.
             | 
             | Frankly, even if they were to, I'm certain they'd end up
             | getting bailed out anyway. But I can't see it getting to
             | the point to begin with.
        
           | chasd00 wrote:
           | yeah that's my gut feeling. Also, no one at these enterprises
           | are to blame they can all point fingers at CloudStrike and
           | abuse their account reps. That way they don't have to put in
           | the work to actually switch vendors while appearing like
           | they're "on it". I bet they all get pretty nice discounts on
           | renewal like you said but that will be it.
        
         | CivBase wrote:
         | They were valued near $100B prior to this incident and even now
         | their valuation is north of $60B. Even if they were held
         | financially responsible for all $6B in damages - which is
         | definitely not going to happen - that doesn't seem like a
         | company-ending scenario.
         | 
         | Their biggest problem is obviously going to be with customer
         | retention, but there are huge technical and regulatory hurdles
         | their customers would have to go through to switch to a
         | competitor. I'm sure many of their customers will accept this
         | as an isolated incident and be quick to accept CrowdStrike's
         | assurances that this won't happen again.
         | 
         | I think Delta Airlines is probably in more trouble right now
         | than CrowdStrike.
        
           | d1sxeyes wrote:
           | As far as I can tell, CS is still up 75% over 12 months.
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | The real problem is their stock crashed, so their best
         | engineers will probably leave, and then it will become
         | increasingly worse in a feedback cycle until possible eventual
         | bankruptcy.
         | 
         | Ideally the stock price should be pushed up to attract better
         | engineers to go in and fix shit. If stockholders agree to bid
         | up the stock 100% YoY, hell, even I'd look for a job there, and
         | help fix shit in return for some juicy RSUs.
         | 
         | If you take away their funding, you can only expect worse in
         | the future.
        
           | chgs wrote:
           | Crashed? Since the start of the year CRWD is up 5%
        
             | dheera wrote:
             | Since the beginning of time everything is up 10000000%
             | 
             | It crashed in the last week. That's what matters.
        
               | cjpearson wrote:
               | But since most engineers probably started before last
               | week, wouldn't they be still up quite a bit? Even with
               | the crash it's up 75% over the past year.
        
               | dheera wrote:
               | They just lost a lot though, losing incentive to stay.
               | But they provide a public good, so it would help for the
               | public to bid the stock up to get the employees to stay,
               | fix things, and vest it rather than ditching the company.
        
         | ridgeguy wrote:
         | Lawsuits may crater CrowdStrike. I'll be surprised if they
         | carry adequate insurance against this large a screwup.
        
         | btbuildem wrote:
         | I think what's more likely is their stock will drop for a
         | while, this will blow over, and everyone will continue to pay
         | their licence fees as if nothing ever happened. Don't
         | underestimate the inertia, ineptitude, and resistance to change
         | that permeates the upper echelons of large corps.
        
       | xedrac wrote:
       | Looks good on a resume:
       | 
       | - Wrote code responsible for $5.4 billion
        
       | solardev wrote:
       | How does a company this big not have automated tests for their
       | config files, and not have gradual/staggered rollouts for their
       | deployments?
       | 
       | Is there some good reason for this approach (need to get config
       | updates into the wild as quickly as possible to combat zero-days
       | or zero-hours?) or was this just a massive oversight?
       | 
       | Side rant... their postmortem took forever to get to the point,
       | first explaining all their jargon and product names. Makes me
       | really appreciate the Cloudflare ones.
        
         | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
         | Often this is not because the team doesn't know about these
         | things but because they have low staffing or other priorities
         | or deadlines. This event looks to me like company rot that can
         | be laid at the CEO's feet
        
         | lupusreal wrote:
         | My bet is they have some normal process for updates that has
         | testing but that process is only enforced by policy, not code,
         | and somebody simply decided it was a waste of their time.
        
         | geodel wrote:
         | Yeah, management should sternly tell _All code / config must be
         | tested before deployment to prod_. Millions of companies have
         | issued this order and after that they are running free of
         | problem for decades.
         | 
         | It is so straightforward and it always works.
        
           | toomuchtodo wrote:
           | Without regulation, best practices are simply opinions and
           | suggestions. "Please do" is insufficient for critical
           | infrastructure. See: financial infra regulatory apparatus.
           | 
           | Incentives, outcomes, the usual.
        
             | specialist wrote:
             | Regulations bad. The invisible foot of Freedom Markets(tm)
             | will fix exactly these kinds of market failures. Rationally
             | speaking.
        
         | devoutsalsa wrote:
         | How many conversations have you had with people at work about
         | how something was a bad idea, only to unsuccessfully avoid it?
        
           | jvanderbot wrote:
           | And conversely, how many good ideas have you proposed to have
           | them put on "next quarter"'s schedule?
        
         | rfoo wrote:
         | > not have automated tests for their config files
         | 
         | They very likely have automated tests. However, what if bug
         | only triggers 90% of the time and you hit the lucky 10% during
         | automated tests? Of course you can run tests 100 times but...
         | is this a common practice? Moreover, we have both code and
         | anecdotal evidences that the bug may indeed happen randomly.
         | Tavis Ormandy posted a rough analysis of the crash context:
         | https://x.com/taviso/status/1814762302337654829. It looks like
         | the crash is caused by first checking if an uninitialized
         | pointer is NULL, and if not, dereferencing it. If the
         | uninitialized leftover data just happened to be zero, no crash
         | happens.
         | 
         | And anecdotally, we saw people reporting that repeatedly
         | rebooting their machines for 15+ times fixed the problem for
         | them - because eventually you got lucky and in a boot it didn't
         | happen and CrowdStrike managed to update itself to not crash.
         | 
         | > not have gradual/staggered rollouts for their deployments
         | 
         | No idea. Maybe their poor reliability guy got overrided by
         | another team, like "how dare you delaying our important
         | definition update? we're racing with threat actors!". I hope
         | they learned their lesson.
        
           | pantalaimon wrote:
           | The crash was triggered by a config file that just contained
           | null bytes as payload
        
             | rfoo wrote:
             | This is a false rumor. Please stop spreading
             | misinformation.
        
           | zelphirkalt wrote:
           | Running tests 100 times only helps, if you have some
           | sufficiently randomized input data, so that the issue can
           | happen.
        
         | chasd00 wrote:
         | hey they're moving fast and breaking things..
        
         | 51Cards wrote:
         | I am wondering if the update passed the test farm just fine,
         | but when the file was moved to the update distribution system
         | that's when the issue happened. The file copied as all nulls
         | and there was no validation check that the file posted ok.
         | Compounded by no validation check on the file after downloading
         | by the end system. Compounded by not having a staged roll-out
         | process for updates.
        
       | mberning wrote:
       | I think this is going to be a huge boon for dell. We had so many
       | older computers that got completely hosed. Lots of Latitude 5400s
       | died completely. All will need replacements.
        
         | seattle_spring wrote:
         | How did it hose them completely? I thought the problem is
         | easily fixed by removing the offending config?
        
           | Thaxll wrote:
           | Never heard of servers with bad hardware that never rebooted
           | for years?
        
             | leetbulb wrote:
             | Many people here have only ever used cloud servers.
        
             | umanwizard wrote:
             | The Latitude 5400 is a laptop.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | How? The fix is to just remove the one bad "Channel File." Are
         | there machines where that does not resolve the problem?
        
         | nerdjon wrote:
         | Hardware failure hosed or just needing a re-image hosed?
         | 
         | Unless the hardware was already near failure I don't see how
         | this could cause hardware failure. The worst case scenario was
         | the machine just constantly rebooting but after 3 (I think,
         | somewhere around that number) it should have launched into
         | WindowsRE.
        
       | nottorp wrote:
       | It's my understanding that CrowdStrike customers buy that thing
       | to check a box in some security audit, not because it provides
       | any other benefit.
       | 
       | Let's blame bullshit compliance?
        
         | wepple wrote:
         | What's that understanding based on?
        
           | nottorp wrote:
           | All previous comments on HN about the incident... I've seen
           | absolutely no one praising the thing as a security solution
           | but a lot of people posting that it's bought to pass audits.
        
         | gruez wrote:
         | >not because it provides any other benefit.
         | 
         | It probably does provide benefits against some clueless intern
         | in accounting downloading a macro-enabled excel file that has a
         | malware enabled.
        
       | LASR wrote:
       | I'm pretty certain CS has contracts that limit their liabilities
       | in events like this.
       | 
       | Probably a refund is all they'll be on the hook for.
       | 
       | Sadly, damage done like this is just chalked up to an accident,
       | and swept under the rug.
        
         | Terretta wrote:
         | > _contracts that limit their liabilities... refund is all
         | they'll be on the hook for_
         | 
         | By cashing in this $10 Uber Eats coupon you agree to hold
         | harmless...
         | 
         | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41058261
         | 
         | - https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-
         | offers-a-10-ap...
        
           | mirashii wrote:
           | "A few people on twitter are saying this thing happened. We
           | didn't actually talk to them, we didn't look at the emails
           | and verify their authenticity ourselves, we just trusted some
           | twitter screenshots and wrote a blogspam article stating it
           | as truth.
           | 
           | We put absolutely no critical thought into whether this was a
           | likely thing, and we completely ignored the many government
           | and media reports that are credibly sourced which state that
           | there are known phishing scams and other threat actors trying
           | to capitalize on this incident."
           | 
           | I highly doubt this is something that Crowdstrike actually
           | did.
           | 
           | Edit: Amazingly they did, the article has been updated with a
           | statement. Amazingly stupid all around.
        
         | vb-8448 wrote:
         | It depends on the actual root cause, gross negligence won't
         | save them, regardless of what they put in the contracts.
         | 
         | From my point of view, one of the greatest problem for them is
         | that they bypassed customers deployment policies.
        
           | sithadmin wrote:
           | >one of the greatest problem for them is that they bypassed
           | customers deployment policies
           | 
           | Caveat emptor. Falcon and other similar security products
           | often push updates at-will, and they're fully transparent
           | about this if you actually read the contract terms and
           | understand the vendor's approach to operations. I have worked
           | with many clients that elect not to use such tools in certain
           | sensitive environments, specifically to mitigate the risk of
           | being impacted by something like CrowdStrike's 7/19 event.
        
           | abnercoimbre wrote:
           | Do we have more insight into the nature or reasons behind the
           | bypassing?
        
           | gruez wrote:
           | >From my point of view, one of the greatest problem for them
           | is that they bypassed customers deployment policies.
           | 
           | Do you really want to wait until for the
           | weekly/monthly/quarterly deployment window to deploy a
           | detection update for a 0day, or a new type of malware?
        
             | vb-8448 wrote:
             | Well, at least it's up to me to decide, not CS.
        
               | gruez wrote:
               | You're free to choose an EDR vendor that allows you to
               | defer definition updates. Remember, this is enterprise
               | sales for multi-billion dollar companies, so the usual
               | excuse of "take it or leave it" doesn't really apply.
        
       | logicchains wrote:
       | Hopefully this will make BigCos think twice about forcing their
       | employees to fill their computers with "security" malware that
       | slows productivity to a crawl.
        
         | disruptiveink wrote:
         | The value proposition of Crowdstrike is exactly that: something
         | that you can deploy to tick the regulatory checkbox of "we have
         | endpoint protection from a reputable company everywhere"
         | without consuming outrageous system resources.
         | 
         | That's why they have so many enterprise customers. They're the
         | only game in town that won't slow down your servers arbitrarily
         | while still convincing an auditor that you do have an
         | antivirus.
         | 
         | Too bad they also crash your whole system every now and then.
        
       | leandrod wrote:
       | Free just got cheaper.
       | 
       | Yeah, I know using free software isn't a panacea. Still it would
       | be a step in the right direction, plus I could not refrain from
       | the cheap shot at M$ Windows.
        
         | xnyan wrote:
         | Cloudstrike customers voluntarily agreed to allow Cloudstrike
         | to push kernel drivers. What should Microsoft have done to
         | prevent this?
        
           | ck45 wrote:
           | Move Windows Defender into user space and enforcing the same
           | for all security software.
        
             | IcyWindows wrote:
             | This has nothing to do with how Defender works.
             | 
             | Crowdstrike shipped a driver that they marked as a
             | mandatory boot driver. The Windows OS could have had more
             | recovery options otherwise.
        
         | gruez wrote:
         | This isn't your personal computer/homelab where you can get
         | away with using common sense antivirus or even windows
         | defender. Software like crowdstrike are often used in
         | industries where they're mandated to install such software for
         | compliance reasons (eg. PCI-DSS). Even if you were using linux
         | you'd still need to install it, and crowdstrike previously had
         | issues with their linux agent. It was just uncommon enough that
         | it didn't hit the news.
        
           | chgs wrote:
           | This is why the important thing is diversity. The more
           | diverse your ecosystem they less likely you are to suffer a
           | catastrophic failure
           | 
           | If half your tills are windows/defender and half
           | linux/crowdstrike then half your tills are going to be
           | working.
        
             | gruez wrote:
             | Except that seems like a maintenance nightmare day to day.
             | There's bugs in the linux version but not the windows
             | version, not to mention having to write two sets of
             | software. Imagine having to get your app's prod to work on
             | both windows AND linux.
        
               | midtake wrote:
               | Agreed. It should be deployed entirely on Linux. Rip and
               | rebuild is much easier on Linux. Using Windows as a
               | server should be seen as a dark pattern in 2024.
               | 
               | For EMS, hospitals, Windows makes sense on the server
               | because they don't know any better. For anyone remotely
               | technologically competent, Windows shouldn't even be
               | considered an option other than as workstations. Linux on
               | the server is the only way and no one can convince me
               | otherwise.
        
               | gruez wrote:
               | >Using Windows as a server should be seen as a dark
               | pattern in 2024.
               | 
               | >Linux on the server is the only way and no one can
               | convince me otherwise.
               | 
               | Now meet the sysadmin that thinks the same, but for
               | windows for clients. At the risk of overgeneralizing,
               | people are only for "diversity" when it means supporting
               | their preferred underdog platform (eg. linux desktop).
               | When they're the dominant incumbent it's suddenly "dark
               | pattern", "they don't know any better" and "no one can
               | convince me otherwise".
        
       | BillSaysThis wrote:
       | $5.4B seems way too low given the number of flights Delta
       | cancelled and will be on the hook to refund.
       | 
       | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/07/23/del...
        
         | gruez wrote:
         | Delta's revenue is only $58.05 billion in 20213. I'm not sure
         | how a day or two of canceled flights is going to be anywhere
         | near $5.4B.
        
           | hysan wrote:
           | Delta only started to recover today, so it's more like 4-5
           | days of canceled flights. Not saying it's a huge difference
           | but 1-2 greatly underplays how bad it was for people flying
           | Delta vs any other airline.
        
           | magic_man wrote:
           | Way more than delta flights were grounded. If you include all
           | the hours lost by all those people and assign some monetary
           | value it's probably more than that. Not only that, but all
           | the hospitals. God forbid someone died because of it.
           | Surprised crowd strike isn't bankrupt
        
           | jvanderbot wrote:
           | Crowdstrike's impact was more than Delta's cancelled flights?
           | How did you arrive at the conclusion it was limited to Delta?
           | 
           | Even still, Delta had a _really bad time_ recovering, and is
           | still cancelling flights days later. It 's not just "a day or
           | two". At a billion a week, with 30-40% cancellation rates,
           | that's 300-400M just for this one customer. And that's _just_
           | lost revenue. Imagine the extra costs: customer service
           | complaints, hardware  / IT restoration, extra wages for
           | flight attendants working double duty to keep the remaining
           | flights going. Madness.
           | 
           | Even just in travel segment, how many hotels, car rentals,
           | uber/lyft rides, etc were cancelled b/c of missed flights?
           | How much do you think they _paid_ on top of the lost revenue
           | to handle customer complaints, IT restoration, etc?
           | 
           | The repair costs alone at a given airport must be staggering,
           | as every terminal screen is BSOD and needs a tech to manually
           | restore from bitlocker.
           | 
           | https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-flight-cancellations-
           | toda...
        
             | gruez wrote:
             | Well the comment I replied to didn't event try to quantify
             | the total impact, and only mentioned delta flights being
             | canceled. There might be a bazillion other ways it can add
             | up to $5.4B, but "flights Delta cancelled and will be on
             | the hook to refund" does not come anywhere close to
             | justifying that number.
        
           | moralestapia wrote:
           | It's more like a week of downtime which totals to about a
           | billion based on the data you brought in.
           | 
           | So, just _one_ of the affected companies brings the total to
           | $1B, wouldn 't you say $5B is actually a low estimate?
        
         | jjav wrote:
         | I would like to live in a world where crowdstrike is directly
         | liable for every dollar lost and has to pay for all of it. Only
         | then would these companies start to take quality seriously.
         | 
         | Of course in our real world, they are unlikely to pay anything
         | at all and just continue operating as-is.
        
           | ghostly_s wrote:
           | It's absolutely ludicrous the US airline industry still has
           | no contingency plan for "a bad software update is pushed by a
           | vendor to our Windows systems."
        
             | SketchySeaBeast wrote:
             | If the computers in a computer reliant massively
             | distributed organization go down, what's the alternative?
        
               | ThunderSizzle wrote:
               | Computers shouldn't auto update. Updates need to be
               | scheduled and monitored and tested.
        
               | lazide wrote:
               | Every CTO's easy answer - cool, we'll just only do them
               | once every 5 years then.
               | 
               | With modern tech stacks, we're talking hundreds of
               | updates a quarter. If not more.
        
           | whoknowsidont wrote:
           | >I would like to live in a world where crowdstrike is
           | directly liable for every dollar lost and has to pay for all
           | of it.
           | 
           | That wouldn't make any sense.
           | 
           | The blame realistically lies within each company who allowed
           | a critical point of failure just so they get checkbox
           | software and not actually have to expend the effort of making
           | sure the company is able to function with their chosen
           | infrastructure.
        
             | margalabargala wrote:
             | Exactly. The customer is to blame here, not the seller.
             | Buyer beware.
             | 
             | If airlines skimp on maintenance and planes crash, well,
             | all those dead passengers should have picked an airline
             | that takes maintenance more seriously. Next time they'll
             | know better.
        
               | autoexecbat wrote:
               | It shouldn't be one or the other, but both
        
           | Terretta wrote:
           | > _I would like to live in a world where crowdstrike is
           | directly liable for every dollar lost and has to pay for all
           | of it._
           | 
           | Or a world where the _regulator_ that required the checkbox
           | -- _even if the firm can demonstrate a superior way of
           | achieving the same objective_ -- should pay for it.
        
           | leros wrote:
           | Crowdstrike's contracts and terms of service will have
           | clauses about how much liability they have when things go
           | wrong. I have no idea what Crowdstrike's policy is, but
           | pretty often, the liability is limited to the amount of money
           | you've paid them during the outage.
           | 
           | I've been involved in procurement at a big corporation and
           | one thing we always modified in contracts was making the
           | vendor 100% liable for any damages caused by their outages,
           | but many vendors wouldn't make that modification.
        
             | cwilkes wrote:
             | I've heard of that for civil engineering firms but the
             | amount of damages is capped at the yearly contract amount.
             | 
             | Which in this case is probably a lot less than what these
             | companies are paying in clean up costs.
        
       | betaby wrote:
       | Well, 'security' check boxes have consequences.
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | Today in "random number pulled out of someone's ass"
        
       | mrinterweb wrote:
       | Can't wait for the class action lawsuit. The total impact is
       | likely greater than $5.4B. A significant number of people must
       | have died due to the impact this had on hospitals and emergency
       | services.
        
         | btbuildem wrote:
         | Realistically speaking, the liability lies with every
         | individual organization that installed the corporate spyware on
         | their systems.
        
         | chasd00 wrote:
         | hmm i was talking with my little sister about picking up some
         | of their stock because these things always just blow over and
         | the stock reverts back to where it basically was in time.
         | 
         | I don't think many enterprises will switch because of the
         | effort required and, instead, they'll just yell at the account
         | reps for a while and then go back to paying the invoice.
         | However, a big lawsuit is something i didn't think of.
        
         | aeyes wrote:
         | Everyone signed their terms of use:
         | https://www.crowdstrike.com/software-terms-of-use/
         | 
         | Section 6.1:
         | 
         | THERE IS NO WARRANTY THAT THE SOFTWARE OR ANY OTHER CROWDSTRIKE
         | OFFERINGS WILL BE ERROR FREE, OR THAT THEY WILL OPERATE WITHOUT
         | INTERRUPTION OR WILL FULFILL ANY OF SOFTWARE USER'S PARTICULAR
         | PURPOSES OR NEEDS. THE SOFTWARE AND ALL OTHER CROWDSTRIKE
         | OFFERINGS ARE NOT FAULT-TOLERANT AND ARE NOT DESIGNED OR
         | INTENDED FOR USE IN ANY HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENT REQUIRING FAIL-
         | SAFE PERFORMANCE OR OPERATION. NEITHER THE SOFTWARE OR ANY
         | OTHER CROWDSTRIKE OFFERINGS ARE FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF
         | AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION, NUCLEAR FACILITIES, COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS,
         | WEAPONS SYSTEMS, DIRECT OR INDIRECT LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS, AIR
         | TRAFFIC CONTROL, OR ANY APPLICATION OR INSTALLATION WHERE
         | FAILURE COULD RESULT IN DEATH, SEVERE PHYSICAL INJURY, OR
         | PROPERTY DAMAGE. SOFTWARE USER AGREES THAT IT IS SOFTWARE
         | USER'S RESPONSIBILITY TO ENSURE SAFE USE OF SOFTWARE AND ANY
         | OTHER CROWDSTRIKE OFFERING IN SUCH APPLICATIONS AND
         | INSTALLATIONS.
        
           | swat535 wrote:
           | Parent is taking about deaths. You can't use terms of service
           | limited iability regarding to death and TOD is not law.. I'm
           | pretty sure it can be'litigated. You can't just say I am not
           | responsible for death or injury and skip all regulatory
           | requirements for safety critical systems
        
             | rpeden wrote:
             | It seems potentially tricky because they didn't just say
             | they're not responsible for death or injury.
             | 
             | They essentially got the customer to accept a contract that
             | says the software isn't designed for use in systems where
             | failure could cause death, and that the customer accepts
             | responsibility for using it appropriately.
             | 
             | I agree this whole incident was a massive blunder by
             | CrowdStrike, but I'm not sure it makes sense to hold them
             | liable for damage caused by customers using the product in
             | a places they explicitly agreed not to use it in. In those
             | cases, I think the organization that installed
             | CrowdStrike's software in inappropriate places bears a lot
             | of responsibility for the outcome, and their failure to
             | understand the TOS they agreed to doesn't mean it's not a
             | legally binding contract.
             | 
             | It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
        
       | ram_rar wrote:
       | Can someone with a background in contract negotiation, vendor
       | onboarding, and business continuity risk management share their
       | expertise? We'd love to hear about typical vendor contract
       | provisions that protect customers in situations like this.
       | 
       | If damages can be demonstrated, what are the chances of airlines
       | successfully claiming compensation? Or, in practice, do such
       | cases usually result in significant discounts during the next
       | contract renewal rather than actual damages paid out?
        
         | com wrote:
         | If the liability is capped at the cost of the duration of the
         | incident (70 minutes from Crowdstrike's PR-messaging
         | perspective) or one month's service charge - both pretty normal
         | in standard contracts, then it's only outside of the contracts
         | that some equity could be achieved. Not holding my breath
         | though.
        
       | Thaxll wrote:
       | Imagine Apple / Google pushing an update that bricked 2b+ mobile
       | devices.
        
       | sandworm101 wrote:
       | Does anyone else feel a little sympathy for CrowdStrike? They
       | pushed out something they should not have. OK. That is bad. But a
       | couple days on and the bulk of the difficulties seem to be from
       | how windows handled the situation: The BSODs, the boot loops, the
       | inability to recover from a basic fault. I feel that if this did
       | happen in a linux environment (it could) that it would be easier
       | to isolate and boot systems into some sort of temporary mode.
       | Linux would communicate and offer options. The windows-specific
       | trend of just abandoning all hope, giving up and throwing the
       | BSOD at the user ... CrowdStrike didn't create that.
        
         | betaby wrote:
         | Why there should be any sympathy for them? Their business is
         | shitty boss-ware. I care about boss-ware makers as much as I
         | care about tobacco companies.
        
         | timtom123 wrote:
         | No? They did this on Linux too.
         | 
         | https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_cra...
        
         | disruptiveink wrote:
         | What do you mean? They wrote the kernel driver. With great
         | power comes great responsability.
         | 
         | If you're writing a kernel driver that is deployed throughout a
         | great portion of Fortune 500, with the money that that entails,
         | then you should definitely be able to afford to pay people to
         | write defensive code and have proper pipelines in place.
        
           | sandworm101 wrote:
           | And there is only the one kernel. No easy rollback option at
           | boot, a previous version to at least get the system online.
        
       | monksy wrote:
       | "We can't hold back releases from going into prod.. we have to
       | deliver"
       | 
       | "We don't have enough time to write tests"
       | 
       | "Developers should be able to test their own code"
        
       | ajma wrote:
       | But they apologized with a $10 gift card.
       | 
       | Soo. $5.4B - $10
        
       | throw7 wrote:
       | The preliminary post incident review is here:
       | 
       | https://www.crowdstrike.com/falcon-content-update-remediatio...
       | 
       | It boils down to the "Content Validator" had a bug and gave a
       | false positive.
       | 
       | It's kind of crazy that the 'rapid response content' update was
       | then free to go out direct to production machines with zero
       | actual live testing.
       | 
       | That's either due to c-suite excel cost-cutting/maximize profit
       | or silicon valley yolo.
        
         | slaw wrote:
         | Silicon valley working at midnight? It was a contractor from
         | India.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Don't worry...they're handing out $10 vouchers to make up for it
       | 
       | https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-ap...
        
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