So What Is Going On With The Cloudy Thing?

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I can understand aircraft needing to use clouds but why banks and other places?

Is this a serious question?

Something with worldwide computers so airports, NHS and banks are not working including shops tills etc? Yet the internet works?

Some systems using Windows 365 are "crashing" worldwide.

 Link to AP News Article 

OP, I thought you were asking someone to explain what is meant by The Cloud. Windows 365, as I understand it, is a network based version of Windows. The civilian US government agency I support in my job doesn't use it AFAIK, or at least not to a great extent.

Not heard of windows 365. I used windows 95, 98 and XP and heard of windows 10. Not sure what was wrong with 98 or XP to be honest as I used them a lot. Mums computer is XP and it works fine.

Can't people with windows 365 simply upgrade to windows 10?

I spoke too soon. Some stuff is working, and some isn't.

There's a firm called CrowdStrike that does computer security for a lot of firms worldwide, and they had a snafu with an update. They bricked a lot of computers they were hired to protect.

First I heard of CrowdStrike was in 2016. Democratic National Committee emails were leaked days before the Democratic convention, showing collusion between the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and major news organizations, to promote Clinton and denigrate Sanders. The DNC blamed Russia, and they didn't cooperate with the FBI to corroborate that claim. They said this firm, CrowdStrike, handled it for them. No need to let the FBI look at their server, potentially gathering info to help protect everyone else. No, Russia did it. Totally. Trust us, bro.

Yeah CrowdStrike are in plenty big trouble today. Lots of places just in my little town couldn't take card payments. The cost of this is going to be huge.

CrowdStrike (a security company) pushed a faulty driver update to Microsoft, who then pushed it to all Windows PCs worldwide which were running CrowdStrike software. Given that they have 22,000 corporate customers, including large companies like airlines, banks, healthcare, governments etc., this broke all their PCs, causing them to fail to startup.

The fix is 'relatively' simple, but (a) as you can't access a Windows PC remotely if it can't start up, it has to be performed manually, and (b) it requires admin access to the PC to remove the offending files, which most corporate employees don't have. Chaos has therefore ensued.

Someone who claims to have worked for or with CrowdStrike said that the responsibility for these updates lies with an Agile team. No idea if this is true. If so, it was frankly a disaster waiting to happen.

It's okay. The CEO has come out to say he's 'deeply sorry'.

Apparently a Microsoft glitch

Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs

CrowdStrike provided the Meatballs.

Thing is…

To be a CrowdStrike customer you have to be big enough to afford theirs services, but not big enough or technically sophisticated enough to do your own cyber security. So that is why it is hitting certain industries and governments but not others. People who care about cybersecurity and can afford it but not DIY.

The problem is not “we sent an update that caused Windows Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD)” the problem is “not only were stupid enough to send a update that caused a BSOD which we should have never done without testing, but we sent it everywhere at once, which is stupid squared”. Another problem is since it BSODs servers, some companies have to roll back by hand which means fixing takes MUCH longer than breaking.
With the right hardware or VM hypervisor you can automate the fix, but not all those effected will be in that boat.

And they did it on a Friday meaning that many orgs will not be fully staffed tomorrow. Another big no-no.

OTOH if you are an all Linux shop you are fine. Nothing to do at all, no problem in the first place.

Google CrowdStrike stock graph
And look at the 1 month or 1 week picture to see what this is doing to CrowdStrike’s stock prices.