At the end of last week, the IT industry saw a catastrophic event take place thanks to a faulty patch pushed in to Windows by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm based out of Austin, Texas.
Even though, its timing might've been a boon for those looking to get off work early.
Many critical infrastructures such as Airports and Medical facilities had to bear the brunt of it, raising many important questions over dependence on such centralized pieces of tech.
Luckily, the issue has since been addressed, but this didn't stop many, including us, from creating some funny memes on CrowdStrike's plight.
Sadly, Linux was also affected by Crowdstrike weeks before this catastrophic event occurred, which largely went unknown, until now, that is. 🫤
CrowdStrike's Incompetence: A Heavy Price To Pay For Second-Class Treatment
Back in May, a Rocky Linux user posted an issue on the forum which reported that upgrading to Rocky Linux 9.4 on servers equipped with CrowdStrike's Falcon platform would result in a system freeze due to a kernel panic.
Other users also chimed in, facing similar issues, and after going around looking for potential fixes, they finally found one in Red Hat's Customer Portal, more on that in a bit.
On Hacker News, another user suffering from CrowdStrike's incompetence shared that a fleet of production machines running Debian were taken offline when CrowdStrike pushed an incompatible patch for Debian stable.
When they initially contacted support, CrowdStrike took a day to respond, then asked for more proof, beyond what was already provided, they then took some days to acknowledge it.
And, after making them wait for a couple of weeks, they sent a root cause analysis, which mentioned that they didn't support this specific scenario of Debian stable running version N-1, which the user believed was a supported configuration.
But, wait, there's more!
In a similar situation, many Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users also faced issues due to Falcon, for which Red Hat had to issue multiple warnings.
The first case (subscribers-only) was the one I mentioned earlier for Rocky Linux, in which kernel panic was observed after booting on Linux kernel 5.14.0-410 and later systems due to the falcon-sensor process.
The second case was a system crash issue on RHEL 6 and 7, where Red Hat offered a workaround, by suggesting users disable Falcon to mitigate the issue, with the other option being to contact CrowdStrike support for assistance.
By now, we know how prompt CrowdStrike's customer service is. ☠️
Unsurprisingly, thanks to all the chaos, the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has officially sent a letter to George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, asking him to testify on the massive outage.
I would have liked to think that this was due to Linux-based OSes being affected, but, as we all know, Windows is the favorite child among all the operating systems for a bulk of the population.
Fun (or ominous!?) fact, George was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of McAfee back in 2010, when the infamous DAT 5958 antivirus update managed to cripple millions of Windows-equipped computers around the world.
💬 The motorsport fan in me knows CrowdStrike from the sponsorship and infrastructure support they do for the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team. What about you? Did you know of them before?
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