The massive global tech outage that occurred on Friday due to an error in an update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike may largely be out of the public’s mind today. And that’s thanks to IT admins and departments around the world who sprung into action to fix the problem that …
Read More »Huge Microsoft Outage Caused by CrowdStrike Takes Down Computers Around the World
Banks, airports, TV stations, health care organizations, hotels, and countless other businesses are all facing widespread IT outages, leaving flights grounded and causing widespread disruption, after Windows machines have displayed errors worldwide. In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system started reporting devices showing …
Read More »The Global CrowdStrike Outage Triggered a Surprise Return to Cash
On Friday, when a CrowdStrike update caused millions of Microsoft systems to crash around the world, many businesses were faced with a choice: Go cash-only or close until systems came back online. This quickly caused chaos in Australia, whose government has explicitly encouraged businesses to go cashless. Pictures posted on …
Read More »Don’t Fall for CrowdStrike Outage Scams
The security firm CrowdStrike inadvertently caused mayhem around the world on Friday after deploying a faulty software update to the company's Falcon monitoring platform that bricked Windows computers running the product. Fallout from the incident will take days to resolve, and the company is warning that, as system administrators and …
Read More »Why the Global CrowdStrike Outage Hit Airports So Hard
Early Friday morning, a flawed software update from the security firm CrowdStrike took down Windows computers across the world. For the aviation industry, the outage created the kind of chaos usually reserved for sudden, catastrophic weather—except all over the world, all at the same time. The outage highlighted an assumed …
Read More »The Global IT Outage Sends Hospitals Reeling
It was half past midnight Eastern Time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor who works as chief information officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly noticed that a substantial number of computers across the health care center had ceased to function. In the hospital’s parlance, it counted as a …
Read More »How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers
Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over …
Read More »Microsoft Faces EU Charges Over ‘Abusive’ Bundling
Brussels has accused Microsoft of illegally abusing its dominance in the business-software market at the expense of smaller rivals, following a complaint at the height of the pandemic by US competitor Slack. The European Commission said on Tuesday it found that Microsoft was restricting competition by selling its video-conferencing software …
Read More »Big Tech Is Giving Campaigns Both the Venom and the Antidote for GenAI
The Biden campaign is facing its first major cheapfake scandal this week. Doctored clips of Biden at the G7 Summit and a Hollywood fundraiser have spread across platforms like X, claiming to show Biden wandering off, mumbling unintelligibly, or, uh, even pooping his pants. It’s exactly the type of content …
Read More »AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think
Aaron Damigos’ inbox was hit with a dreaded, ubiquitous business-update calendar invite on June 3. The meeting included someone from HR, his manager, and upper management—and ultimately resulted in the sudden end to his job as a web support associate with Microsoft. Microsoft reportedly laid off some 1,000 people in …
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