Microsoft certifies third-party drivers through its Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) program. Drivers submitted by hardware manufacturers and vendors like CrowdStrike undergo testing to ensure compatibility, stability, and security with Windows operating systems. But sometimes, things go horribly wrong.
Our monitoring and helpdesk started lighting up early last Friday (made more ironic by the fact that we practice “Read Only Fridays”). Servers were down, systems were reporting offline, and critical software had gone nuts. The issue? A Windows patch and a driver by popular security vendor CrowdStrike.
The thing is we don’t use CrowdStrike. What we were seeing were chain reactions, as well as the outages with the customer brands that we work with. This meant that smaller offices were largely unaffected, while chains and corporate hotels were in a world of hurt. Eventually, there was a trickle-down effect, where scores of additional, seemingly unrelated services were affected by their own, internal failures.
A day later, all of our clients have been remediated, but there is a lingering concern about unforeseen downtime and security risks.
Our team had no internal issues. We’re all on Macs.
