While Windows PCs suffer a massive global CrowdStrike IT outage, Macs remain unaffected, CrowdStrike said. The debacle, caused by a defective update, halted airlines, hospitals, public transport, and more.
Jordan Hart for Business Insider:
While Windows users suffered from a global IT outage, Mac owners weren’t affected by the defect responsible.
Major airlines, banks, and retailers are experiencing widespread disruptions linked to the outage after Microsoft reported problems with its online services, linked to an issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Many businesses have been held up by the “blue screen of death” on their Microsoft devices since early Friday morning, but it’s business as usual for Mac users, according to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
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MacDailyNews Take: The productivity loss surely outweighs whatever was “saved” by standardizing on cheap, crappy Windows PCs.
See also: The debate is over: IBM confirms that Apple Macs are $535 less expensive than Windows PCs – October 20, 2016
Windows is a cancer on personal computing and the choice to “standardize” on Windows was one of the worst mistakes ever made en masse. Thankfully, that mistake can easily be corrected: Get a Mac.
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Yeah, I’ve been working all day on this recovery of our Windows servers, particularly in Azure. Mount a recovery partition, delete bad file, mount boot partition, start up, all in the slow ass Azure Gov portal. Over and over and over. Yay for the clould! Yay for Microsoft! Yay for Azure! and Yay for ClownStrike!… and a few years back we were hit with the Yay for Solarwinds! I love Microsoft! I woudn’t have job without it. 🙂 And my coworkers wonder why I don’t use a MS PC at home.
In the business world, computer systems are largely PC/Windows based; essentially a monoculture.
The first thing I learned in plant ecology studies is that “diversity is the strength of a species”.
Now we have a monoculture that is fertile ground for a pathogen to create havoc on the entire population.
I’m pretty confident this won’t be the last time this happens, until/unless the business world invests in a more diverse computing environment.
Monoculture? Both Mac and Windows have one OS each.
Hardware wise… no comparison on Windows diversity.
But when China want’s to censor iOS, you really see the effects of a mono culture.
Apple has multiple OSes: MacOS, iOS for iPad, iOS for iPhone, TVOS, etc.
All sharing the OS X codebase!
Many years ago I would use the “network ecological argument” as an argument for Macs as well.
You’re right about the monoculture of OSes. Even iOS wasn’t immune when ALL browsers regardless of origin that ran on it were affected by a single bug in WebKit. The only Chrome browser version that was vulnerable was iOS. All other versions on every other platform were fine.
I’m pretty confident this won’t be the last time this happens, until/unless Apple invests in a more diverse web browser engine environment.
I work on an AF Base. All windows. I didn’t see any effects of the clownstrike when I got to work at 7:30am. Everything was slow as usual. Everything’s on a cloud. They will pass out iPhones, surprisingly to people at work. But. Microsoft is so Entrenched in the government That they have made a huge mistake.
One of the things that is different this time is that the media is actually pointing out that Macs are unaffected.
You’re right. Why single out Macs when there are many other OSes also not affected.
This outage won’t change anything. Companies aren’t going to move from WindowsOS to MacOS simply because of a software glitch. WindowsOS is so firmly embedded in the corporate world that it will never go away, not even a little bit. WindowsOS will stay as the number one corporate operating system until the end of time. This outage won’t amount to much. Crowdstrike’s CEO already apologized and their corporate clients will get some small amount of compensation and that’s about it. Crowdstrike’s share price will recover quickly. People commenting about a Crowdstrike bankruptcy or crashing share price are ridiculous. No company affected by the outage is going to get millions of dollars in compensation.
For the most part, I agree. “Asset inertia” is a real thing, and things don’t change until there is a very compelling reason to do so.
It will likely take more than a 1-day outage to get the rest of the world to consider a more diverse computing environment. When it does happen, and I’m pretty sure it will, Linux servers will be the most likely alternative, as Apple hasn’t had server offering since they killed Xserve.
IBM changed their approach because the calculated reduction in maintenance costs was larger than the cost of switching.
Oh stop. Mac / macOS has been subject to their own assortment of global failures over the years. They just weren’t as disruptive because nobody’s running critical systems on macOS.
While discouraged, macOS continues to support kernel-space drivers as they have not provided an option for some of them to be moved to userspace.