[Kevin Beaumont] What I learned from the ‘Microsoft global IT outage’

Media coverage largely sucked

When I just looked at my phone, the headlines were about an unfolding Microsoft global IT outage. My first thought, ransomware. So I logged in and started looking around at what was happening — I’m a CrowdStrike customer — and quickly realised two different, separate things had happened:

• Microsoft Azure had an outage earlier in the day. This was resolved before I got up. Azure has frequent outages (don’t kill me, Microsoft) — this isn’t abnormal.
• CrowdStrike had made a boo-boo and pushed out a channel update that had borked a decent percentage of customers.

The media connected these two events together and conflated them. They weren’t connected.