---

Grant
Darwin NT

---

---

Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

---

Prepare for a rocky ride- looks like there's a big internet meltdown in progress- reports of network issues here in Australia for multiple major businesses, and also reports from overseas of network issues developing.
Another backbone botched software update?


Edit-
Reports of Supermarket checkouts down, flight check-ins down.
The ABC, SBS & Sky media have all had systems affected. ABC video editing systems are down, but live broadcasting is still occurring. Reports of all NSW government departments being affected, including police & fire services.
Universities, law firms, Bunnings, blood donation services, banks and supermarkets are among the places have been reported as experiencing outages.

My super fund, Australian Super is reporting issues- account login isn't possible. Their web site is slower than a week of wet Sundays.



Maybe this is the cause of this one-

There's lots of discussion online about the possible cause of the outage.

We do know that Microsoft has reported a major technical outage affecting operations across the world.

The company said it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the US which had caused the grounding and cancellation of several flights.

Microsoft said its outage started at about 6pm ET on Thursday (8am Friday AEST), with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

So if they're not using Azure, they're OK. If they are, then they (and you) are screwed till they undo whatever they did to stuff things up.


Could be a cascading issue- supposedly the initial Central US problem has been resolved, but other regions are now having Azure go down in a screaming heap.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

I’m in the middle of the United States and internet service is a bit slow lately.

---

This is looking ugly- now being reported as due to an issue with Crowdstrike Falcon

"Crowdstrike is a global cyber security company who provide detection and monitoring tools to cyber and IT teams.

Found this on Hacker News.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195

> Summary

> CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.

> Details

> Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.

> Current Action

> Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.

> Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.

> Latest Updates

> 2024-07-19 05:30 AM UTC | Tech Alert Published.

> Support

> Find answers and contact Support with our Support Portal

And these

17min ago We have ~50 thousand laptops in reboot loop and ~1.5k servers as well. No resolution yet.

23 min ago Husband is a deputy in California. His department and many others here are down as well (including PDs, jails, ambulance companies, etc.)

---

Grant
Darwin NT

Sounds like a denial of service attack.
I got a notification of one of my old accounts being compromised. It was photobucket. No loss there. I think we all stopped using it when it went pay for use years ago.

---

Multiple reports of a fix for an affected system-

Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment

Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory

Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.

Boot the host normally.

Apparently just renaming the CrowdStrike folder to something else allows you to re-boot normally.
I feel for those with hundreds (and thousands) of affected systems.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

Sounds like a denial of service attack.

Worse than that- a broken software update for an enterprise anti-virus/ anti-malware programme.

All well and good for systems that are booting from the network.
But if the systems are booting from their own drive, i can't see any way of fixing things other than manually by booting each system into Safe Mode & editing the necessary file/folder.
Maybe a batch file to help, but still- it's going to suck hugely (especially with Win11 systems).



And the really brilliant part of this- the company has a Tech Alert post on the issue and how to fix it , but you have to have an account with them to log in to find out about it & what to do...

---

Grant
Darwin NT

This is just plain messed up. Not to mention a FEDERAL crime.
Not the USPS truck.

---

Worse than that- a broken software update for an enterprise anti-virus/ anti-malware programme.

Just imagine what chaos would ensue if this happened after we are all relying on AI.

Or if AI pushes the updates ...

Wishing you a Happy Virus-Free Friday,

A certain bank here (ANZ) has been advertising their "Falcon Technology" at a great rate of late, but I havn't seen 1 of those adds since yesterday. LOL

Cheers.

A certain bank here (ANZ) has been advertising their "Falcon Technology" at a great rate of late...

Oh, I think people are still saying that at a great rate today, just in a different context. ;^)

---

So close- swap 1 & 3.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

A certain bank here (ANZ) has been advertising their "Falcon Technology" at a great rate of late...

Oh, I think people are still saying that at a great rate today, just in a different context. ;^)

They certainly will be using a different context if they can't access their accounts today.

Funnily enough I knew nothing about it until I got back home yesterday afternoon as my card worked fine paying my grocery bill across at the supermarket, at my bank's ATM to get money out and 2 taps at the supermarket in town (and 1 of those taps was for a mobile phone top up).

Cheers.

Given what happened to cause this, it's hard to image a company as big as this one not testing things before deploying them.
So the other option- a disgruntled employee?

I've seen quite a few posts of people asking for a copy of the file that caused all the carnage, curious as to just what it did to bring the systems down.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

A certain bank here (ANZ) has been advertising their "Falcon Technology" at a great rate of late...

Oh, I think people are still saying that at a great rate today, just in a different context. ;^)

They certainly will be using a different context if they can't access their accounts today.

Funnily enough I knew nothing about it until I got back home yesterday afternoon as my card worked fine paying my grocery bill across at the supermarket, at my bank's ATM to get money out and 2 taps at the supermarket in town (and 1 of those taps was for a mobile phone top up).

Cheers.

Luckily my Superfund have got their systems back up and running again.
Even more luckily, my Credit Union wasn't affected at all.

---

Grant
Darwin NT