I don’t think you guys fully grasp how big this is.
Around a billion computers are bricked worldwide, mostly corporate ones.
This isn’t just an online service going down for a few hours. Every affected computer needs to be rebooted in fail mode and have a driver manually removed.
Most corporate computers given to employees don’t let users do this themselves. Even if they could, imagine every single double-digit IQ wagie trying to handle a moderately complex task when many don’t even know what a file is anymore.
I can’t stress enough the scale of this happening.
https://x.com/raymo_g/status/1814234785226604963
Bricked? Yup, seems like a big pile of useless stuff out there? I’ve warned folks of every sort clear back to the 60’s, do not bet your life, your bizness, or anything else of value on systems that can be accessed by anyone else. If the old 80 hole punch cards help your bizness, go ahead and use them. If a big roll of paper tape helps your book keeper, fine, use it. Utilities were among he first to get lazyass by making their grids controllable from someplace else.
And airlines? You go ahead Mr. Genius, show us how your whole system can turn to krap because a geek in some back room skipped a neuron. Slow learning dumbasses will yet do us in. My own shop has some of the neatest machinery anyplace, anywhere, but it will not skip a beat over this mess since it has zero connections to any outside anything. And if I need to fly, my plane will start and go wherever I point it without waiting in line at an electric ticket counter.
It’s impossible to know ... but we may getting very close to the bullseye :)
my impression is ... somebody just shut the backdoor.
That’s my situation. I have a work laptop (why, I don’t know, but I have it). Anyway, if I fire it up, odds are that the errant update will have been installed. But maybe not - the computer has been off - actually shut down - for 2 days so the update might not have come.
And I got a whole drawer full of files in the tool cabinet, including one my dad didn’t like. He always called it the flat bastard. Heh heh
And yes, that IS what that type is called.
“Around a billion computers are bricked worldwide, mostly corporate ones.”
Not sure I buy this statement. “Bricked”, to me, implies that the computer is dead and inrecoverable. Not an IT guy, so that may not be true.
I read something, somewhere this morning (sorry, no link) where this was caused by a failed software update at Crowdstrike. This is what caused the blue screen of death on so many computers that use Windows 365 - Microsoft’s cloud-based software (plus anything else running off of Crowdstrike.
Windows 365 is what MS pushes so they have full access to everything on your computer, and many corporations use the enterprise version so they don’t have to buy individual licenses for each computer. Just one of the many reasons not to run your software out of the cloud.
Failed SW updates do happen, but that does not preclude hanky-panky. The solution should be to roll back to the previous version and restart. If that’s not working, I can’t be of any more help to them (obviously).