Asklemmy

43376 readers

1413 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Crowdstrike Cockup (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by Tekkip20@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So as we all know on the news, the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike Y2K'd it's own end customers with a shoddy non-tested update.

But how does this happen? Aren't there programming teams and check their code or pass it to a quality assurance staff to see if it bricked their own machines?

8.5 Million machines too, does that effect home users too or is it only for windows machines that have this endpoint agent installed?

Lastly, why would large firms and government institutions such as railway networks and hospitals put all their eggs in one basket? Surely chucking everything into "The Cloud (Literally just another man's tinbox)" would be disastrous?

TLDR - Confused how this titanic tits up could happen and that 8.5 Million windows machines (POS, Desktops and servers) just packed up.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 7 points 1 month ago

But how does this happen?

It's destined to happen, according to Normal Accident Theory.

Aren’t there programming teams and check their code or pass it to a quality assurance staff to see if it bricked their own machines?

Yes, there are probably a gigantic number of tests, reviews, validation processes, checkpoints, sign-offs, approvals, and release processes. The dizzying number of technical components and byzantine web of organizational processes was probably a major factor in how this came to pass.

Their solution will surely be to add more stage-gates, roles, teams, and processes.

As Tim Harford puts it at the end of this episode about "normal accidents"... "I'm not sure Galileo would agree."