Seems the Azure issue preceded the Crowdstrike problem.
—
CrowdStrike, not Microsoft
Early reporting from national media organizations misattributed the IT issues to Microsoft, which itself battled its own outage hours earlier on its Azure cloud platform, but this appears unrelated to the underlying problem causing the widespread IT issues across the world.
This particular Azure issue was affecting Microsoft 365 subscription services but was already resolved by the time disruption scuppered global systems.
Microsoft found the time to respond to us briefly today, but continued to ignore our repeated requests for an explanation over allegations that it failed to properly notify customers of a Russia-attributed data breach.
A spokesperson said: “We’re aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform. We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming.” ®
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/19/crowdstrike_shares_sink_as_global/
I got paged yesterday evening, late last night, and at 4AM this morning. Our issues were Azure authentication based yesterday (unrelated to Office365), but I don’t know yet about this morning.
I completely get why people might get the two conflated, and they actually might be related. For all we know, Microsoft Azure uses Crowdstrike and did updates in a flawed way with inadequately tested software. Normally, I would assume you would have a redundant system, take one offline, upgrade it, see if it works, then put it back online and take another node offline and do that one, but if you told me they did them all at the same time in a critical place, I might post the “This is my surprised face” graphic.
My specialty at this point in my career is testing our software for upgrades. I am involved in one regimen where I have been working on it for two months and my test plan involves 1500 discrete steps, and I take that care because if a physician care is delayed to a patient having a stroke because of some unanticipated flaw in my software that I introduced in an upgrade, even a small delay for that patient it can mean the difference for them between having few or no symptoms going forward, or being bedridden unable to move for the rest of their lives or...being dead.
And that patient might be my loved ones, friends, or...me. But for me, even if it is a complete stranger, that is enough.
So, I take it damned seriously. But if the people being hired to perform these tasks (such as Microsoft may do) are from some third world country who may or may not see things the same way I do, then who knows what or how they might test.
Value systems and culture count. They aren’t meaningless. And I can’t guarantee those people will see these kinds of things the same way I or a fellow American might.
This kind of thing counts.