massive IT outage hits the world

vacheron

onomatopoeia99 said:

vacheron said:

I was very impressed at my local Asda superstore a few years ago when they had a payment process outage while we were in the store and by the time we came to pay about 20 minutes later a manager was pushing a cart behind the 20 or so checkouts and handing out card impression machines and piles of carbon payment slips and pens to each cashier.

Cards are increasingly not having the embossed numbers on them so won't work with the impression machines.  Certainly my main credit card doesnt, nor does my current account debit card, so it's the chip or nothing.

Yes, I was going to mention that. 

All of my main credit and debit cards still have the embossed numbers, but I also cycle through a number of 0% credit cards which I use for Stoozing, but once they have arrived they go in a drawer and never see the ligtht of day again, and more and more of these are arriving with no raised numbers.

Vitor

Fair point from Microsoft, the EU obliged them to allow 3rd party suppliers to install their lame software on Windows but didn't demand the same from Apple.

Microsoft blames EU rules for allowing world's biggest IT outage to happen (telegraph.co.uk)

DullGreyGuy

onomatopoeia99 said:

vacheron said:

I was very impressed at my local Asda superstore a few years ago when they had a payment process outage while we were in the store and by the time we came to pay about 20 minutes later a manager was pushing a cart behind the 20 or so checkouts and handing out card impression machines and piles of carbon payment slips and pens to each cashier.

Cards are increasingly not having the embossed numbers on them so won't work with the impression machines.  Certainly my main credit card doesnt, nor does my current account debit card, so it's the chip or nothing.

The impression machine was just a way to accelerate the process, the form can also be completed by hand and most cards do still have the card number, expiry date etc on them even if its not embossed. 

Vitor said:

Fair point from Microsoft, the EU obliged them to allow 3rd party suppliers to install their lame software on Windows but didn't demand the same from Apple.

Microsoft blames EU rules for allowing world's biggest IT outage to happen (telegraph.co.uk)

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsofts-eu-agreement-means-it-will-be-hard-to-avoid-crowdstrike-like-calamities-in-the-future 

A similar article that isn't behind a paywall 

As the articles present in theory they could lock down the kernel but only if their own Defender End Point was also redeveloped not to need kernel level access but inevitably you'd probably need lawyers rather than journalists to review the exact detail of the agreement. 

Crowdstrike does make a Mac version which didnt and couldn't cause the same problem because Apple dont give them access to the kernel but they've adjusted their software to accept this. 

Sea_Shell

I remember my dad's card being worn flat from being used in those roller machines all the time.

My first time using one, as the retailer, I put the card and slip in the wrong way round and almost broke their card .  Oops.  Rookie mistake.

RumRat

I've hod no trouble with tap and go payments all through this so called major outage. I think the last time I had any actual cash was just before lockdown. 
Cashless works for me, until it doesn't. I don't suppose cash will disappear totally from the world, but tap and go is always going to be my preferred method of payment.
I've just come back from a weekend in a hotel/golf/spa complex that was totally cashless throughout the establishment, in all bars, restaurant and shop. I think many more will go down that route eventually.

Olinda99

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1e8xdlg/crowdstrike_it_outage_explained_by_a_windows/

interesting video on the tech behind crowdstrike failure

DullGreyGuy

Olinda99 said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1e8xdlg/crowdstrike_it_outage_explained_by_a_windows/

interesting video on the tech behind crowdstrike failure

It is interesting and somewhat raises the question on the MS certification programme that their testing didnt identify that the driver didnt have proper error handling on duff data in the uncertified dynamic definitions file. 

victor2

Olinda99 said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1e8xdlg/crowdstrike_it_outage_explained_by_a_windows/

interesting video on the tech behind crowdstrike failure

Interesting,  even if some of it goes way over my head! It is some pretty random guy on the Internet, but there's a lot of believable stuff in there.