A Small Collection of CrowdStrike “Blue Screen Death Day” Memes

On 2024–07–19, Windows Blue Screen of Death causes a massive outage globally.

The cause, according to Microsoft, is "due to a recent CrowdStrike Update".  Gergely Orosz wrote a good explanation on this.

"Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company valued at $80B, and the market leader for Windows endpoint protection, with around 22% market share. So 1 out of 5 businesses operating Windows machines use them.

What seems to have happened is that Crowdstrike pushed an innocent-enough software update… to all Windows machines, globally, pretty much a the same time. Crowdstrike's software operates at the kernel level: and this update crashes Windows.

Normally, when buggy code is pushed to production: you'd "just" revert this change, and push the previous version (or code that works correctly,) and when clients get this patch: they are restored. But not in this case: because these machines are non-functional.

The fix - as advised by Crowdstrike - is manual and time consuming, and needs to be repeated for every single Windows machine impacted. The machine needs to be booted to safe mode, a file needs to be deleted, then the machine rebooted."

This, really, is another classic example of Murphy's Law, which states "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong".

The most effective and practical way to significantly reduce this issue is to implement a robust and comprehensive end to end test automation process for regression testing. However, sadly, end to end (especially UI) are often neglected at software companies.

It is so common that many programmers have "shall be all right" altitude. Their high ego (can't imagine a worse one than programmers) tend to neglect software testing.

Surely, there was huge productivity loss yesterday. Many (highly paid) IT workers pretty much had an off day. The poor ones are travellers.

This meme was reposed by Elon Musk. Yes, choosing Linux as the server OS is the right decision.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Windows is the only desktop OS that is NOT FREE.

In this incident, I think Microsoft shares the same amount of responsiblity.

What’s your level of confidence on Azure DevOps or CI/CD services now?

There is a cost (can be huge) to avoid testing, especially regression testing.

Sometimes, it right to be different.

Linux is free and super reliable, and have been that for over decades. It deserves respect. Microsoft included Linux in Windows, known as Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). But really, it is far better for Microsoft ditch old-and-legacy Windows OS/file system, learn from Steve Jobs, just implement an UI part on top of a Linux system.

We, software professionals, should have formalize this day (like Father's day) to remind that as software engineers should take software testing seriously.

My questions: "Who proved his pull request in the mandatory code review process? 😊" and "Where is the CI/CD process at this valued US$80 billion company (in the software safety)?" "D" means Delivery, and includes E2E testing, right?

Clearly, the common 'mandatory code review process', like at nearly every software team, is not effective and costly. Check out my article, "Formal Code Review Process is No Good", in which a popular Meme actually explains this CroweStrike case.

Related reading:

My eBooks:

- “Practical Web Test Automation with Selenium WebDriver"

- “Practical Continuous Testing: make Agile/DevOps real”

• Benefits of Test Automation and Continuous Testing series: Executives, Managers, Business Analysts, Developers, Testers and Customers.
• A Good Software Testing Culture Can be Easily Broken
• Why are Unit/Integration Testing and API Testing Not Enough for Real Agile?
• Formal Code Review Process is No Good. Time and money are much better spent on E2E (UI) Test Automation as Regression Testing.