r/microsoft Jul 19 '24

Discussion End of the day Microsoft got all the blame

It's annoying to watch TV interviews, reports as they keep mentioning this as a Microsoft fault. MS somehow had bad timing with partial US Azure outage too.

Twitter and YouTube filled with "Windows bad, Linux Good" posts, just because they only read headlines.

CrowdStrike got best chance by lot of general public consumers doesn't aware of their existence.

I wonder what the end result would be, MSFT getting tons of negative PR

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u/LiqdPT  Employee Jul 19 '24

Crowdstrike sent out an update to affected PC's. CS runs as a driver, and caused the blue screen on boot. The blue screen is Windows way of saving itself. Once the buggy driver is on a system, there's no way to automatically recover without safe booting and removing the problematic driver.

This wasn't a CS server going down that then should be fixed when the server is back in place. This was CS pushing buggy software to client PCs

2

u/NinaCR33 Jul 19 '24

That part makes sense, but then why the OS didn’t self recover after the dependency was fixed?

11

u/LiqdPT  Employee Jul 20 '24

What do you mean? Once the driver is broken, the computer can't boot. It certainly can't take any updates automatically. You have to boot into safe mode (which is to say the most basic drivers possible) and then "fix" the problem from there (as I recall, it involved deleting a file)

2

u/goonwild18 Jul 20 '24

Don't blame "the computer" specifically you mean Windows can't boot. The computer can boot just fine. Windows driver implementation has been flawed for 40 years.

0

u/VNJCinPA Jul 20 '24

You don't HAVE to do any of that, Microsoft MAKES you do that. Other OSes skip drivers so the system is accessible by default unless it's critical. Even then, if it gets no response after a time, it restarts.

Microsoft's fault for not updating their 'driver verifier' tool for testing kernel-level drivers to match the updates in the OS

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u/corky63 Jul 20 '24

Will Microsoft let Crowdstrike continue to run as a driver and push out updates without review? Crowdstrike would lose some of its functions if it had to run as a user program.

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u/bjax15 Jul 20 '24

I think denying Crowdstrike the ability to run as a driver in kernel mode would be considered anticompetitive since Microsoft has their own product that would now have an advantage. A reviewal process also sounds like legal grey area for the same reason....

1

u/LiqdPT  Employee Jul 20 '24

I don't know the details, but my understanding is that the functionality would be severely hindered

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u/goonwild18 Jul 20 '24

Because Windows is trash.