CrowdStrike IT Outage Explained by a Windows Developer

"Agile, ambitious and aggressive" the sarcasm with which this phase was uttered, wonderful.

While this is technically what crashed machines it isn't the worst part. CS Falcon has a way to control the staging of updates across your environment. businesses who don't want to go out of business have a N-1 or greater staging policy and only test systems get the latest updates immediately. My work for example has a test group at N staging, a small group of noncritical systems at N-1, and the rest of our computers at N-2. This broken update IGNORED our staging policies and went to ALL machine at the same time. CS informed us after our business was brought down that this is by design and some updates bypass policies. So in the end, CS caused untold millions of dollars in damages not just because they pushed a bad update, but because they pushed an update that ignored their customers' staging policies which would have prevented this type of widespread damage. Unbelievable.

Dear God! I’ve been out of the IT world for 15 years now, and I still understood his explanations. I’m VERY IMPRESSED by Dave’s clear and concise presentation and astounded by the fact that I remembered enough of this “stuff” to finish some of his sentences! Until today, I was convinced that a benevolent universe had purged all that out of my head to make room for important stuff (like cocktail recipes).

Our engineer dodged this one by not signing up for CS and keeping Sophos. CS charges about $30k extra for content filtering, which Sophos includes. We have computers all over the world so this would have hit us hard not being able to get to all those remote users and sites.

3 days ago no one outside of IT had ever heard of Crowdstrike. Now the entire world knows the name. Reputation destroyed in an instant.

The company I work at got bought by a bigger one. They required us to install Crowdstrike on all servers. We found a memory leak, that Crowdstrike still hasn't fixed after 6 months so I have refused to install it until then. I was on vacation when I saw all URGENT emails from other divisions. Thank you Crowdstrike for not fixing your memory leaks, it saved my vacation. =P

Crowdstrike - good name for a company which hit masses throughout the world with its product.

What a great explanation! No bull crap. No conspiracy theories. No badmouthing. Just plain facts. Even me… who rarely uses a computer anymore understands, and follows Dave’s explanation and walks away a little more knowledgeable. Thanks Dave😊

The most funny thing is that CEO of Crowdstrike was a CTO at McAfee... during their worldwide faceplant.

As a former CrowdStrike employee this is the best explanation I have heard and is 100% accurate.

System administrator is such an under appreciated role. Glad I got out of it when I did.

This was incredibly precise and VERY easy to understand. Fortunately my employer doesn't use Crowdstrike so I got to sit back and watch some of my friends scramble. Thank you for putting this out.

Love that while stuck at the airport Dave opened his MacBook. A fair amount of dry humor in this vid.

for some reason dave's explanation was waaay easier to understand than every other video about this

Crowdstrike: Run our software and we guarantee no one will access your system.

Dave, as a layperson I really appreciated your video. While I did not understand all the language, I found your explanation thorough and informative. I now have a better understanding of why the Crowdstrike crash was so disruptive. Thank you.

I am a network systems engineer that had to deal with this for 14 hours that day. This was one of the most informative videos I have ever seen. You helped simplify Windows OS in 15 minutes in a way that hours of reading hasn't. Something about real world scenarios to tag the concept with in my memory really helps. Thanks!

I just learned more about system functions in 5 minutes then I would’ve imagined. What a clear breakdown on things.

What I've learned so far is that every OS has a big boss and that big boss ensures everyone follows the rules and as soon as someone gets out of line the big boss shuts the party down before the looting begins. In all seriousness this is a great video. Subbed!

well, sometimes people get confy and forgets that "with great power comes great responsability", thanks for the video Dave