Things went very wrong on Friday.

A bugged CrowdStrike update temporarily bricked quite a lot of computers, bringing down such fun things as airlines, hospitals and 911 services.

It was serious out there.

Ryan Peterson: Crowdstrike outage has forced Starbucks to start writing your name on a cup in marker again and I like it.

What (Technically) Happened

My understanding it was a rather stupid bug, a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

Zack Vorhies: Memory in your computer is laid out as one giant array of numbers. We represent these numbers here as hexadecimal, which is base 16 (hexadecimal) because it's easier to work with… for reasons.

The problem area? The computer tried to read memory address 0x9c (aka 156).

Why is this bad?

This is an invalid region of memory for any program. Any program that [...]

---

Outline:

(00:31) What (Technically) Happened

(03:38) Who to Blame?

(06:58) How Did We Let This Happen

(12:41) Regulatory Compliance

(18:14) Consequences

(19:54) Careful With That AI

(29:34) Unbanked

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:
July 22nd, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oAKfaxKKfuz2cuRLr/on-the-crowdstrike-incident

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“On the CrowdStrike Incident” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma)