News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
A Tennessee Tech professor said he hopes more awareness of update testing comes from Friday’s worldwide computer failures.
IT outages happening as many Windows computers started failing to reboot properly Friday morning due to an issue with a software update. Tennessee Tech Cybersecurity Center Associate Director for Workforce Development Eric Brown said the IT outages are due to an update from CrowdStrike, a cloud-based cybersecurity company that works closely with Microsoft on their cloud program, Azure. Brown said CrowdStrike has already issued a fix to stop the problem from spreading but it will take some time to fully recover.
“The issue now is the cleanup,” Brown said. “This is not oh, we have a fix, click, and everything goes back. Some of these machines that are now in a recovery state will not automatically recover. It’s going to require the intervention of IT teams in these companies.”
Brown said the main lessons from the event are for software developers to thoroughly test their updates before a wide release and for users to have a back-up plan to continue operating if a service goes down.
“It’s back to classic planning that we’ve taught for forty years, we just still have problems with it sometimes,” Brown said.
Brown said the problem is widespread because so many companies rely on Microsoft’s services and there is now a cascading effect impacting any industry using them. He said that various healthcare and airline companies have had to adjust their operations avoid creating problems for their customers.
“With Microsoft 365 and Office 365 being impacted, systems built on top of that platform, their Power BI platform, things like that, are inherently impacted and will impact the companies downstream from them,” Brown said.
Brown said that the only people impacted by the update are the ones that have CrowdStrike’s software somewhere in their security stack.
“It’s not that just because I’m running a Microsoft product, this is going to be a problem,” Brown said. “That is not necessarily the case. However, if a company that’s offering an online service is using this product or is relying on an upstream product to deliver their their service that has been impacted by CrowdStrike, that’s how this kind of propagates down.”
Brown said it is important to understand that this issue has not been caused by a cyberattack.
“This wasn’t a cyber outage as much as this was an IT outage that had a significant, significant impact,” Brown said.
