July 2024 – Crowdstrike outage, Big Tech vs EU, OpenAI money issues

What we know about CrowdStrike’s update fail that’s causing global outages and travel chaos

A faulty software update issued by security giant CrowdStrike has resulted in a massive overnight outageRead the article ontechcrunch.com

💥What happened? An update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity system has caused BSOD loops all over the world.

A faulty software update issued by security giant CrowdStrike has resulted in a massive overnight outage that’s affected Windows computers around the world, disrupting businesses, airports, train stations, banks, broadcasters and the healthcare sector. CrowdStrike said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack, but was the result of a “defect” in a software update for its flagship security product, Falcon Sensor. The defect caused any Windows computers that Falcon is installed on to crash without fully loading. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” said CrowdStrike in a statement on Friday. Some businesses and organizations are beginning to recover, but many expect the outages to drag on into the weekend or next week given the complexity of the fix. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told NBC News that it may take “some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover.” In a later tweet, Kurtz apologized for the disruption. Zack Wittaker, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Tech Crunch

Delta CEO says CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage cost the airline $500 million

Bastian said the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”Read the article oncnbc.com

The aftermath? Well, to kick things off, as you might have guessed, a lawsuit. The CEO of Delta Airlines seems to be very upset about the whole thing.

Bastian, speaking from Paris, where he travelled last week, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”
“If you’re going to be having access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve got to test the stuff. You can’t come into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug,” Bastian said. CrowdStrike has so far made no offers to help Delta financially, Bastian added, beside offering free consulting advice on dealing with the fallout from the outage. A CrowdStrike spokesperson said in an emailed statement that it has “no knowledge of a lawsuit and have no further comment.” Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Delta hired prominent attorney David Boies to seek damages from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft, CNBC reported earlier this week. Boies is known for representing the U.S. government in its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft. Leslie Josephs, Ece Yildirim
CNBC

CrowdStrike incident has CIOs rethinking their cloud strategies

CIOs are looking at ways to avoid single points of failure and are re-evaluating their cloud strategies to prevent any 'blue screen of death' incidents.Read the article oncio.com

💥 What can we learn? The whole incident has CIOs all over the world rethinking their cloud strategies:

Shashank Jain, CIO at the financial services firm, Shree Financials, suggested a strategic shift. “Organizations and CISOs must review their cloud strategies, and the automatic updating of patches should be discouraged. All patches should first be tested on a test server,” Jain said further emphasizing that despite CrowdStrike’s reputation, the incident revealed a failure of trust due to untested patches causing a cascading effect. Saurabh Gugnani, Director and Head of CyberDefence, IAM, and Application Security at Netherlands-headquartered TMF Group, added that a diversified approach to cloud strategies could mitigate such risks. “Yes, they [enterprises] should revisit cloud strategies. It has to be a mix of all the available solutions.” Gyana Swain
CIO

Tech giants up ante by withholding products from EU

Tech giants are playing one of the strongest cards they have: withholding their products.Read the article onaxios.com

The ripple effect of EU’s AI Act and other regulations – tech giants are withholding their AI products in the EU:

“Aiming to fight what they see as vague and overly burdensome regulation by the European Union, U.S. tech giants are playing one of the strongest cards they have: withholding their products. Why it matters: Until now, the U.S. tech giants have dominated the global digital economy by serving (almost) everyone, accepting divergent regional laws as the cost of doing business.” Ina Fried
Axios

OpenAI could be on the brink of bankruptcy in under 12 months, with projections of $5 billion in losses

OpenAI might need another round of funding to remain afloat.Read the article onwindowscentral.com

OpenAI might need another round of funding – the operating costs are quite staggering:

For context, OpenAI spends up to $700,000 daily to keep ChatGPT running. The amount is likely to fluctuate as the model becomes more sophisticated and advanced. The report sheds more light on OpenAI’s financial status, citing that the firm is well on its way to spending a whopping $7 billion on training its AI models and an additional $1.5 billion on staffing. These expenses alone stack miles ahead of its rivals’ expenditure predictions for 2024. Kevin Okemwa
windowscentral.com