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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

> Like it’s insane to me that this size and criticality of a company doesn’t have a staging or even a development test server that tests all of the possible target images that they claim to support.

Who is saying they don't have that? Who is saying it didn't pass all of that?

You're making tons of assumptions here.

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To be sure. But the fact is the release broke.

I'm not sure: is having test servers that it passed any better than none at all?

Yes, yes it is. Because there's tons more breakages that have likely been caught.

One uncaught downstream failure doesn't invalidate the effort into all the previously caught failures.

At the same time (and I am looking directly at Unit Tests when I say this) I have seen what is perhaps dangerous confidence that, because such and such tests are in place, we can be a more lax when pushing out changes.

It is absolutely better to catch some errors than none.

In this case it gives me vibes of something going wrong after the CI pipeline, during the rollout. Maybe they needed advice a bit more specific than "just use a staging environment bro", like "use checksums to verify a release was correctly applied before cutting over to the new definitions" and "do staged rollouts, and ideally release to some internal canary servers first".

I don't understand why you wouldn't do staged roll outs at this scale. even a few hours delay might have been enough to stop the release from going global.

"Have these idiots even heard of CI/CD???" strangely seems to be a common condescending comment in this thread.

I honestly though HN was slightly higher quality than most of the comments here. I am proven wrong.

Big threads draw a lot of people; we regress toward the mean

Agreed - The worst part is most of the people making these unhelpful comments are probably doing the same sorts of things which caused this outage.

> I honestly though HN was slightly higher quality

HN reminds me of nothing so much as Slashdot in the early 2000's, for both good and ill. Fewer stupid memes about Beowulf Clusters and Natalie Portman tho.

They almost certainly have such a process, but it got bypassed by accident, probably got put into a "minor updates" channel (you don't run your model checker every time you release a new signature file after all). Surprise, business processes have bugs too.

But naw, must be every random commentator on HN knows how to run the company better.

> (you don't run your model checker every time you release a new signature file after all)

Wonder if the higher-ups who mandated this software to be installed in their hospitals were informed about that fact.

The release didn’t break. A data file containing nulls was downloaded by a buggy kernel module that crashed when reading the file.

For all we know there is a test case that failed and they decided to push the module anyway (“it’s not like anyone is gonna upload a file of all nulls”).

Btw: where are these files sourced from? Could a malicious Crowdstrike customer trick the system into generating this data file, by e.g. reporting it saw malware with these (null) signatures?

A lot of the software industry focuses on strong types, testing of all kinds, linting, and plenty of other sideshows that make programmers feel like they're in control, but these things only account for the problems you can test for and the systems you control. So what if a function gets a null instead of a float? It shouldn't crash half the tech-connected world. Software resilience is kind of lacking in favor of trusting that strong types and tests will catch most bugs, and that's good enough?

Yeah... the comment above reads like someone who has read a lot of books on CI deployment, but has zero experience in a real world environment actually doing it. Quick to throw stones with absolutely no understanding of any of the nuances involved.

So let's hear the "nuances" that excuse this.

It’s not a matter of excusing or not excusing it. Incidents like this one happen for a reason, though, and the real solution is almost never “just do better.”

Presumably crowdstrike employs some smart engineers. I think it’s reasonable to assume that those engineers know what CI/CD is, they understand its utility, and they’ve used it in the past, hopefully even at Crowdstrike. Assuming that this is the case, then how does a bug like this make it into production? Why aren’t they doing the things that would have prevented this? If they cut corners, why? It’s not useful or productive to throw around accusations or demands for specific improvements without answering questions like these.

I am not defending of excusing anything. I am saying there is not enough information to make a judgement one way or the other. Right now, we have almost zero technical details.

Call me old-fashioned and boring, but I'd like to have some basic facts about the situation first. After this I decide who does and doesn't deserve a bollocking.

I think we do have enough info to judge e.g. :This should not have passed a competent C/I pipeline for a system in the critical path."

Thay info includes that the faulty file consisted entirely of zeros.

> That info includes that the faulty file consisted entirely of zeros.

Even that is not certain. Some people are reporting that this isn't the case and that the all-zeroed file may be a "quick hack" to send out a no-op.

So no, we have very little info.

But the all-zero file is version CS has IDed as the cause, right?

No, CS has explicitly stated that the cause was a logic error in the rules file. They have also stated "This is not related to null bytes contained within Channel File 291 or any other Channel File."

Not an excuse - they should be testing for this exact thing - but Crowdstrike (and many similar security tools) have a separation between "signature updates" and "agent/code" updates. My (limited) reading of this situation is that this as a update of their "data" not the application. Now apparently the dynamic update included operating code, just just something the equivalent of a yaml file or whatever, but I can see how different kinds of changes like this go through different pipelines. Of course, that is all the more reason to ensure you have integration coverage.

There is no nuance needed - this is a giant corporation that sells kernel layer intermediation at global scale. You better be spending billions on bulletproof deployment automation because *waves hands around in the air pointing at whats happening just like with solarwinds*

Bottom line this was avoidable and negligent

For the record I owned global infrastructure as CTO for the USAF Air Operations weapons system - one of the largest multi-classification networked IT systems ever created for the DoD - even moreso during a multi-region refactor as a HQE hire into the AF

So I don’t have any patience for millionaires not putting the work in when it’s critical infrastructure

People need to do better and we need accountability for people making bad decisions for money saving

Almost everything that goes wrong in the world is avoidable one way or the other. Simply stating "it was avoidable" as an axiom is simplistic to the point of silliness.

Lots of very smart people have been hard at work to prevent airplanes from crashing for many decades now, and planes still crash for all sorts of reasons, usually considered "avoidable" in hindsight.

Nothing is "bulletproof"; this is a meaningless buzzword with no content. The world is too complex for this.

> You better be spending billions on bulletproof deployment automation

There is no such thing.

You must have insanely cool stories :-)

What are your thoughts on MSFTs role in this?

They’ve been iterating Windows since 1985 - doesn’t it seem reasonable that their kernel should be able to survive a bad 3rd party driver?

1. System high/network isolation is a disaster in practice and is the root of MSFT and AD/ADFS architecture

2. The problem is the ubiquity of windows so it’s embedded in the infrastructure

We’ve put too many computers in charge of too much stuff for the level of combined capabilities of the computer and the human operator interface

Dude, the fact that it breaks directly.

You sound like the guy that a few years ago tried to argue (the company in question) tested os code that didn't include any drivers for their gear's local storage. Its obvious it wasn't to anyone competent.

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