Just for the sake of discussion, as a long time Linux user (but never a Crowdstrike user) -- is there anything about this outage that could only have happened on Windows? If the update had been broken in another way, could it have crashed all Ubuntu machines, or all Macs?
Not excusing what happened in any way, I'm just curious.
MacOS doesn’t allow third party kernel modules any more, so CrowdStrike on Mac can’t cause the same problem. On Linux, the latest versions of CrowdStrike use eBPF while older versions were kernel modules. The older versions definitely could have had the same issue. In theory, use of eBPF should prevent the same problem in the newer Linux version.
Bad software updates can come from anywhere, and it remains bad no matter what the intention is and no matter what operating system it runs on.
When people install bad kernel-level software, they open their systems up to [more] kernel-level flaws and crashes.
Linux doesn't have a BSOD .. is this the equivalent of a kernel panic?
systemd, a software suite providing system components for the Linux operating systems, implements a blue screen of death similar to those of Microsoft Windows using a systemd unit called systemd-bsod since August 2023, which was fully added on December 6, 2023 starting with version 255 of systemd.[36] It does not replace the kernel panic featured within Linux (see below); rather, it is only used in the event of a boot failure.
But yeah, kernel panics or the equivalent happen to ~all OSs.
I did read somewhere yesterday that macOS does not allow third party software to run at kernel level in the same way, thus couldn’t face the same issue.