Global IT Outage

You can look at this from a few angles.

The first (a more high level one) in regard to 'resistance' that the Quarum was meeting about. I have noticed a trend among some businesses to moving away from cloud systems in recent years, because of failures and the costs involved from those failures (as well as the security issues that could introduce).
This (I would hope) will make a lot of larger corporations reconsider their IT system - if they can think logically/don't have other forces pushing towards centralisation that is.

The timing is interesting for sure - and it does serve as the perfect distraction from Trump.

So the point I'm interested in is was it deliberate or incompetence or both?
Deliberate distraction (although most likely at the cost of sacrificing CrowdStrike as a viable company).
Incompetence - a result of continuing disintegration from vaccines (up to and including lack of skilled staff)/DEI policies etc
Both - and here I get speculative. I've followed in passing how some malware etc works, and one of the favourite methods of extracting information and/or gaining access to the system in a way that's not allowed is memory overflows. Was something hastily added to gain access to something - but that wasn't tested well enough and as such crashed everything?

T.C. said:
@Ant22 Did you manage to get a flight?
Click to expand...
Yes, please let us know when you can Ant.
 
When I bought a new laptop last year it was a headache to get them to install Office 2021 even though I had paid for it. The default was 365. Even now every time I go to save a file the default is on the cloud. It takes me far longer to save things but luckily I have always saved to external hard drive.

However, recently I have been noticing that the external hard-drive is flashing when I am not even using it, just because it is connected to the laptop.
I do get the feeling that I am not the only one using my laptop sometimes, it feels that a 'presence' is there - spyware built in I guess.
 
happyliza said:
When I bought a new laptop last year it was a headache to get them to install Office 2021 even though I had paid for it. The default was 365. Even now every time I go to save a file the default is on the cloud. It takes me far longer to save things but luckily I have always saved to external hard drive.

However, recently I have been noticing that the external hard-drive is flashing when I am not even using it, just because it is connected to the laptop.
I do get the feeling that I am not the only one using my laptop sometimes, it feels that a 'presence' is there - spyware built in I guess.
Click to expand...
good you say this. i have exactly the same phenomenon and i have been hacked before. i am weary and i have activity monitor running all the time, and it shows activity even while i do nothing. i am on mac, and my expert says not to worry. but i remain suspicious...
 
I was in too, our Azure servers were all down on Friday morning. The restoration to a previous backup solved the problem but as a whole, we lost an half day of production. That will be hard to compensate as the holidays are here soon.

For my part I think it's intentional. Look like the update was not tested as the problem is systematic so it could not have escaped a simple test of implementation on a single PC. It's just unthinkable. I think it's just the part of a bigger plan which include this cloud promotion.

IT management follow the trend. And they follow the trend because upper management tell to do so. Just by saying that all you IT is in the cloud, you add value to your company. It's hard to escape.

I have the sensation that they messed the blow, like the Trump assassination attempt. And it will be more hard to do it again as companies will be more prepared. For private individual it's another thing.

Schwab - cyber attack.jpg
 
T.C. said:
@Ant22 Did you manage to get a flight?
Click to expand...

I did, although it departed with over a 5-hour delay. It was very uneventful apart from that, so I guess planes don’t use the same software as the one that went loco yesterday.

Some flights departed with only minimal delay, others were massively late or cancelled. Given that airlines are obliged to pay passengers around £400 or so per head if a delay is over 3 hours I guess its likely they decided to push some flights through before the 3h mark to avoid penalties, while making other flights even more delayed as it doesn’t really matter how much over 3h a delay is to qualify for the payment. This way, they’ll have to pay late departure fees for less flights. Not a bad strategy to be honest, even if my flight was one of the unlucky ones. Although I do wonder if force majeure rules will be applied to help airlines avoid paying up.

EmeraldR said:
Global IT meltdown show perils of cashless society
Click to expand...

Interestingly enough, I heard quite a few people say exactly that at the airport. Looks like the outage was bad advertising for the cashless society!
 
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Ok, one more meme, cause the wit out there is sharp.
Hopefully most of you have seen “The Princess Bride”, and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it!

“For anyone working in IT today:
“You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never click yes on a Windows update."
6723697E-B0A4-41CC-96B5-35EA1F9ADEB5.jpeg
 
This was a major disruption for healthcare in my area (Boston and environs) because of the non-functionality of EPIC. All non-essential medical procedures/tests were cancelled. Paper charting, which is difficult and makes more room for errors, was rolled out for all hospitals using EPIC. EPIC is back up and running today.
 
I feel sure other IT pros here would agree with most of the following. The Occam's Razor (simplest) explanation is that software quality assurance, IMO, is now abysmal and has been a race to the bottom for many years due to human-natural greed, which has led to:

-- poorer training of developers and testers (weaker schooling in general, all the way down to spelling, writing and speaking skills)
-- weaker and weaker technical oversight of developers and testers
-- the complete takeover of processes by corner-cutting rapid-development methodologies (Agile)
-- relegating QA testing to the final stages of development
-- shift towards judging effectiveness of testing by statistics (easily manipulated to hide trouble)
-- ever-accelerating focus on introduction of features instead of fixing bugs, leading to quality crises
-- accelerated and misplaced reliance on (buggy/incomplete) test automation
-- the house of cards constructed by building on (buggy) third-party software components over which there's little-to-no control
-- the shift to SAS (software as a service) subscription models with high exit barriers forcing customers to accept whatever they get
-- decreased consequences for poor quality because it's everywhere and the real costs are transferred from makers to customers
-- the false sense of security that the ability to patch (because nearly everything has a server component) confers
-- burnout of workers moving from one crisis to another and expected to be accessible 24/7
-- increased outsourcing of development and testing to third parties in lower-cost nations without enough knowledge/oversight of their processes (basically, globalization)
-- consolidation of the industry into sector monopolies lessening alternatives/choices
-- compounding effect of workers who've grown up in this sloppy environment and know no better
-- confluence of all these factors results in an industry workforce that no longer even knows or understands the proper processes that were developed and documented decades ago and are ignored due to expense

I learned proper quality testing methodologies long ago, in a small, independent company that made completely tested products for mostly big software publishers, so I've witnessed all of the above take place in a bunch of companies, including advent of DEI policies, which are just icing on this nasty, inedible cake. It seems to me that AI-written software would simply inherit a lot of these weaknesses.

Growing dissatisfaction, frustration, and stress led me to leave full-time employment in IT six years ago and go part-time in an academic environment (at 20% of my former income) where there's no cutting edge and never an emergency. I think I benefited, mentally/physically, but it left me with lower expectations and trust regarding software.

There are hundreds of articles on this stuff. For reference:

Top Five Causes of Poor Software Quality | Datamation

Causes of Poor Software Quality Poor quality is not an inevitable attribute of software. It results from known causes. It can be predicted and controlled,
www.datamation.com www.datamation.com
www.ciodive.com

Poor software quality cost businesses $2 trillion last year and put security at risk

The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the rise of operational software failure, the report author says.
www.ciodive.com www.ciodive.com
spectrum.ieee.org

Why Software Fails

We waste billions of dollars each year on entirely preventable mistakes
spectrum.ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org
 
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