Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike says a “defect” in one of its software updates hit Windows operating systems, causing major IT outages across the world with flights cancelled and banking, healthcare and shops affected. 9bn was wiped off the firm with CEO George Kurtz, losing nearly £250million of his personal fortune.
Many thanks to Hugh for tech background:
“I spent 30 plus years in the IT world before retiring in 2023. Most of my colleagues would tell you that an event like today has been coming for a long time. Ostensibly the issue is the release by Crowdstrike of an update to its network security products but the real issue was the way it impacted the Microsoft Windows operating system causing it to abort with a Blue Screen of Death. Without going into technicalities it once again highlighted the fact that Windows is at core not a particularly well designed product. It was originally developed as an operating system to be run by a single user on a single computer. Over time it has metamorphosed into an enterprise wide product running on a variety of hardware platforms. At heart, however, it still has many of the weaknesses that were present when it was first built. The biggest of these flaws was the fact it allowed third party software providers to modify parts of the core operating system. This meant it was always likely to fail badly if there was a fault in these products. This is essentially what happened today. A properly designed operating system would have recognised the fact the CrowdStrike software update had failed, flagged the error but would have still started. What has caused todays issue is that thousands of desktops, servers and other devices in many businesses have collapsed in a heap and refused to restart. Moreover, the problem has been compounded that most of them are protected by BitLocker disk encryption so they can’t be easily restarted in a safe mode so a fix can be applied without a recovery key being entered. In some cases these are stored on other Windows Servers which are themselves down because of the Crowdstrike issue.
In Astrological terms today’s issues started at about 05.00 UTC with the Moon at 28 Sagittarius squaring Neptune at 29 Pisces. Mercury at 23 Leo was square Uranus at 26 Taurus. Mars was opposite the Crowdstrike 2011 Pluto Saturn midpoint at 29 Scorpio and squared the natal Mars at 28 Leo. Pluto at 0 Aquarius squared the Crowdstrike Pluto/Mars midpoint at 1 Scorpio. As the day progressed the Moon moved over the Crowdstrike 2011 Pluto at 5 Capricorn.”
Crowdstrike was incorporated 7 November 2011 which gives a Scorpio Sun with Uranus at 1 degree Aries, the latter having a disruptive tr Pluto sextile to the Uranus. And more significantly Mars in Leo opposition Neptune which is catching the tailend of the transiting Mars (Uranus Algol) square and the Solar Arc Sun also square – which would flare up into a massive publicity event (Mars Neptune involving panic (Mars Neptune) and aggravation (Mars.) The revolutionary Uranus square Pluto in early Capricorn will be undermined as tr Neptune Saturn move into early Aries circa 2026/27.
The Crowdstrike IPO, 12 June 2019, launched on an aggravated Mars North Node in Cancer opposition Saturn Pluto which has moved by Solar Arc with the SA Mars now exactly opposing the Pluto as it hits the buffers.
Microsoft, 20 November 1985, has its Scorpio Sun exactly square the Crowdstrike Mars opposition Neptune, so it is also catching the tr Mars (Uranus Algol) square and that will ramp up next year as tr Uranus gets to the exact opposition to the Microsoft Sun. There is also a pressured SA Pluto conjunct the Microsoft Mercury exactly now – with a huge upheaval approaching as the SA Pluto is conjunct the Uranus by 2027. By 2028 there is a collision-type experience from SA Mars conjunct the Sun which will bring a setback and then forced change.
Additional thoughts from today’s papers: Electric vehicles are packed with much software that it is not clear whether they would still run if all the central cloud systems were down. Soon we will soon be relying entirely on the National Grid for all our heating and transportation, as well as keeping the lights switched on and that is vulnerable to computer glitches. Will the wind turbines and solar farms that Ed Miliband is busily building still operate if there is a systems failure in the background? Your guess is as good as mine, but probably no-one has bothered to ask. The new range of digital phones won’t work when the web or the electricity goes down, unlike the old copper wire systems.
Having lived in rural France where the electricity grid is erratic and unstable, keeling over at the first lightning strike, the only sensible system is at least one wood burner, cooking with butane/propane and a copious supply of large candles. Going all electric is a total horror if there is a several day outage. The eco-nuts may appreciate living in tents but the rest of us would prefer to have belt-and-braces back-up schemes.
I haven’t checked in a while, but it’s as if there was a mention of George Kurtz’s astrology around here. Maybe his lawyers wanted it removed?
“There has been a huge amount of pressure both by end user customers and by third party software suppliers to make automated patching by IT departments the default. Managers in companies have been happy to comply with this process as it shifts the cost of testing to suppliers and gives the end users the opportunity to invoke penalties under service contracts etc with them when things go wrong. As a consequence for most computer users of Windows it is very hard to turn off automated updates particularly of Microsoft’s own software.”
I’m not sure I fully understood this.
Hugh
Thanks for your analysis, spent 21 years in IT and now retired. Dave, unix was one of the operating systems many of my colleagues preferred especially because of its robustness.
This wasn’t even malicious – which, ironically, Crowdstrike is intended to prevent. The real fear is when conflicts arise; in many ways, such attacks have already begun, with nations using corporate hardware and software to spy on its own citizens as well as on enemies, engage in thefts of intellectual property via identity spoofs, ransomware, and regular online attacks on any institution or individual with an online presence. Or engineering the type of computer virus that crippled Iranian nuclear facilities.
As an engineer myself I can see all too well how things can go wrong; I try to keep nothing on the cloud, but unfortunately it is practically impossible to avoid becoming a target unless you manage to be 100% ‘off the grid’.
As a mere employee I have already had personal data stolen via a major hack this past year on a supposedly secure file transfer process. This was due to both centralization and decentralization: centralizing the management of certain data to a single external company, and transferring that data via a common tool, while decentralizing employee data by outsourcing it to another organization instead of keeping it in-house the old fashioned way. This is how a majority of companies now run, supposedly for more efficiency. But we lose control over how our information is handled.
There is another irony that when I began working on computers, we had ‘terminals’. Then came the personal computer revolution, which empowered individuals, but for some time we have been returning to the ‘terminal’ model, though our terminals are fancier and more powerful. Even software now wants to run off the cloud, so you’d be forced to pay for it, and they don’t have to deal with releasing and updating millions of users. These days there is even more money in data-mining (before it was ad targeting, now it’s AI), so every company wants to have access to your data, whatever it is, so online it has to go (or install its app – another practice I resist as much as I can).
The institution where I work was hit with both Crowstrike and another, internal disruption 2 wks earlier due to a set of software updates that crippled it for several hours. This tells me that we are being warned to make preparations, and fast, because it will get worse.
My sense is that, expensive and tedious as it will be (and certainly ‘inefficient’), every individual and every organization needs to have a backup for the most critical data, in a different and physically separate format. Yes, this means having paper backups (so much for the ‘paperless’ workplace) which is what I do for all my financial statements. The department where I work employs the same logic: a version online, a physical copy offline. I have stubbornly kept my landline, tho someday I’m sure I will be forced, as Mom was, to replace it with an internet connection.
More importantly, as the Crowdstrike crisis demonstrated, it means having a separate set of computers which can’t be infected with whatever ails the main systems.
These measures won’t prevent theft – the horse has already left the barn – but it will help fight ransomware, and keep things running.
Govt, banks, utilities, transportation, telecommunications all need to have such backup systems – while they currently do so with data, they don’t with the hardware and software.
This crisis also reminded me of scifi scenarios where there are survivors on a ship unaffected by whatever ‘virus’ or attack spread through the network because their systems were too old. In real life, some transportation systems in the US remained mostly unaffected by Crowdstrike precisely because they still ran on legacy systems.
I have kept my land line too but when all goes down I really wonder who can I call with my landline. Literally no one in the extended family have it, and younger generations are moving to places where local government don’t even build the landline infrastructure
And thanks for your advice. I will go and do up some hardcopy stuffs.
Good write up. I need to get my landline back for emergencies. I do love my broadband. I froze my credit several years ago due to attempted Identity Theft. If you have concerns, it helps. I also back everything up on a separate hard drive that I can unplug from the computer. I have three, and they are stashed in different places. I also have paper copies.
Krebs on Security did a good write up.
One of the comments in Krebs on Security came from an IT CIO. His remark was on the difference in cultures now – traditional IT where you test things and DevOps where you break things fast. He put the blame on the DevOps new culture arising.
“Pluto at 0 Aquarius squared the Crowdstrike Pluto/Mars midpoint at 1 Scorpio.”
Interesting to see the chart for the WWW, 6th August, 1991 (ADB). It has Saturn 2 Aquarius opposite Chiron 1 Leo. Pluto in Aquarius tests the structure of the WWW?
It was ‘born’ with Uranus 10 Capricorn, conjunct Neptune 14 Capricorn – a fantastical, ambitious beast. They quincunx the Leo Sun, which squares Pluto. Inventor Tim Berners Lee (8th June 1955) has Uranus 25 Cancer square Neptune 25 Libra, with Jupiter 29 Cancer. Wonder what he thinks about his invention? Maybe the Pluto in Capricorn transit brought food for thought?
Re additional thoughts, couldnt agree more and aside from that the Cloud consumes massive amounts of energy.
The only way round it is not to store anything on it. Safer too.
“In a single year the power consumption of a single cloud user can be anywhere between 60Kwh and 1600Kwh. That’s the equivalent of running 8 extra fridges running in your home.”
https://toffeeshare.com/blog/15/How-much-energy-does-it-cost-to-store-data-online/
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/
We as a planet we are not causing Climate change it is cyclical and has happened before, we cannot only have one type of
fuel electricity, we need oil gas and electricity, when the planet supplies all these and more.
It is only a money maker for the few to make us slaves.
Richard Carrington British Astronomer recorded the largest geomagnetic storm CME Coronal Mass ejection, known as the Carrington event as 1859, when the the Telegraph system of the day was knocked out and caused havoc, what could one do today!!
Food for serous thought, especially with Pluto moving into Aquarius.
Ted Koppel wrote a book a few years back called “Lights Out” basically what happens if our grid goes down. Worth the read, not hysteria. Some of these very large transformers can take up to six months to replace, and there have actually been several attempts to take one out – Durhum, NC, and Baltimore, Md.
I learned a lot by reading this post. Thank you to all the contributors. I know Crowdstrike was installed at the Kernal Level – and it is meant to determine if an intruder is in your network. A worry. I was trying to understand what happened. Our business was not affected, but I did check yesterday to see if my paycheck made it (automatic deposit – wondering if my bank was affected – it is all in the ethers – is it real if the power is out? )
A wise astrologer years ago told me to have paper copies of my assets so I could prove if they were mine.
Thank you to all.
Apparently the EU forced Microsoft to allow some 3rd parties to make alterations to the kernel in 2009.
In reply to SuHu – this may well be very enlightening for those who do wonder about the state of the infrastructure of the national grid
‘Switching off Britain’s wind farms has added £806m to energy bills
An independent report created by Lane Clark & Peacock (LCP) and commissioned by Drax suggests the cost of turning off UK wind farms to manage the electricity system rose from almost £300 million during 2020 to more than £500 million last year.
Interestingly, the authors of the report suggest enough renewable power to supply 800,000 homes went to waste in 2020 and 2021 as wind farms were asked to switch off by the Electricity System Operator.
According to the report, this was because of constraints in the transmission system and a lack of long-duration storage capacity, which is needed to manage periods when renewable power generation outstrips demand.
The authors of the report also note that this practise has contributed to higher carbon emissions as gas-fired power stations were brought on to plug gaps in supply. (energylivenews)’
Also, I know that more battery storage units are coming along to enable properties to store excess energy in the day and release it when needed.
With Pluto shortly to stay full time in Aquarius I expect the energy problems to be seriously sorted – I know a lot of R&D is moving fast around the planet to provide sustainable energy systems. Google the blog by James le Terriere (Titbits) who correlates world wide events relating to energy, his blog is a real eye opener.
Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a P.CEEeeee……..
Thank you Hugh, very illuminating. I have long said we rely on things that we can’t rely on – all that has been referred to here – Plus the potential ability of hostile State Actors to paralyse our societies by taking down the grid and thus internet and communications with it. It was interesting to note that this was assumed to be the case yesterday until Crowdstrike owned up to their mistake. I had kind of assumed that mercury square mars/uranus/algol were the triggers, but clearly it is much more complex than just that. I also live in a rural area and although we don’t lose power due to lightning strikes there is a problem with oversupply to the grid (infrastructure lagging behind) which can lead to outages. So I keep some cash and fuel to hand for emergencies and we are investigating the options for a back-up generator in the shed to keep us going if need be. Especially as the Netherlands is working hard to get off gas asap. All new housing is electric only! This latest event, that also incapacitated banks here, IMO pinpoints where communities need to start working together to maintain vital infrastructure.
I would have thought the approaching Full Moon on Sunday, at 29 degrees Capricorn exactly conjunct transiting Pluto and sextile transiting Neptune, is the culprit.
Probably contributes.
And on that anaretic degree the old guard has now gone, at least on the Democrats side…
Yes indeed, the anaretic degree, I wonder if that is why an apparently ordinary Full Moon has had effects more often associated with a Lunar Eclipse.
We’re likely to learn of two failures of Crowdstrike: 1) failure to adequately test, and 2) failure to roll out the update gradually over time rather than to all customers worldwide at the same time. The biggest failures were those of management.
IT Managers find themselves in a difficult dilemma currently. Zero day exploits and high profile hacking cases meant a lot of software Service Level Requirements require security patches and software updated immediately. Failure to do so can also trigger problems with company insurance. There has been a huge amount of pressure both by end user customers and by third party software suppliers to make automated patching by IT departments the default. Managers in companies have been happy to comply with this process as it shifts the cost of testing to suppliers and gives the end users the opportunity to invoke penalties under service contracts etc with them when things go wrong. As a consequence for most computer users of Windows it is very hard to turn off automated updates particularly of Microsoft’s own software. Normally this has a lot of benefits as it greatly reduces the number of unpatched machines that can be exploited by malicious hackers to access company networks. What happens when it goes wrong can be seen from what happened on Friday 19th April 2024.
For managers it is quite possible that such mass outages where nearly everyone is impacted is less risky in terms of their careers than failing to patch and finding your company name alone in the media headlines when your system gets hacked. Of course, one might ask if the fact that software has increasingly become a monoculture dominated by a few major Cloud suppliers and bound together by the internet is the real culprit and that perhaps a rethink of the entire architecture is required. At the very least you would want a methodology that ensures all automated patch updates go through at least a minimal test layer before being flagged for roll out across a businesses estate but that currently is not how many are applied.
Its likely a stupid question but is their anyway it can effect Mac computers tangentially, ie using Outlook or Office?
*there
No. CrowdStrike can be installed on Macs but the operating system has historically been much more resilient to these types of failures. Just accessing Office from one would certainly not impact it particularly as you are almost certainly connecting to it remotely if you have a modern machine. The only issue would be if the Office hosting system was impacted but then you would not be able to get to Office at all.
Thank you, thats what I thought but just wanted to be absolutely
sure.
Hugh – “The Crowdstrike Uranus at 1 Aries is conjunct Microsoft’s Mercury at 0 Aries”
Interesting to see the transiting Mars/Pluto midpoint moving from 29 Pisces to 0 Aries yesterday and today. Quite destructive? Also at 29 Pisces is the tr Saturn/Nodes midpoint with it’s meaning of restrictions or blocks on alliances, and channels of communication. Neptune and Scheat are right there, with all the rise and fall symbolism that suggests. The tr Uranus/Pluto midpoint is currently at 28 Pisces, which I think adds even more emphasis, confusion, and revolutionary themes. I was also thinking that ‘cloud’ storage suddenly sounds very Neptunian!
A relative of mine is an IT troubleshooter. They’ve been talking about potentially dangerous and disruptive flaws in (often poorly maintained) corporate systems for many years. There’ll be more events to come no doubt.
I spent 30 plus years in the IT world before retiring in 2023. Most of my colleagues would tell you that an event like today has been coming for a long time. Ostensibly the issue is the release by Crowdstrike of an update to its network security products but the real issue was the way it impacted the Microsoft Windows operating system causing it to abort with a Blue Screen of Death. Without going into technicalities it once again highlighted the fact that Windows is at core not a particularly well designed product. It was originally developed as an operating system to be run by a single user on a single computer. Over time it has metamorphosed into an enterprise wide product running on a variety of hardware platforms. At heart, however, it still has many of the weaknesses that were present when it was first built. The biggest of these flaws was the fact it allowed third party software providers to modify parts of the core operating system. This meant it was always likely to fail badly if there was a fault in these products. This is essentially what happened today. A properly designed operating system would have recognised the fact the CrowdStrike software update had failed, flagged the error but would have still started. What has caused todays issue is that thousands of desktops, servers and other devices in many businesses have collapsed in a heap and refused to restart. Moreover, the problem has been compounded that most of them are protected by BitLocker disk encryption so they can’t be easily restarted in a safe mode so a fix can be applied without a recovery key being entered. In some cases these are stored on other Windows Servers which are themselves down because of the Crowdstrike issue.
In Astrological terms today’s issues started at about 05.00 UTC with the Moon at 28 Sagittarius squaring Neptune at 29 Pisces. Mercury at 23 Leo was square Uranus at 26 Taurus. Mars was opposite the Crowdstrike 2011 Pluto Saturn midpoint at 29 Scorpio and squared the natal Mars at 28 Leo. Pluto at 0 Aquarius squared the Crowdstrike Pluto/Mars midpoint at 1 Scorpio. As the day progressed the Moon moved over the Crowdstrike 2011 Pluto at 5 Capricorn.
Microsoft has its natal Mars at 24 Aquarius so is currently being triggered by transiting Uranus and its Mercury at 0 Aries is conjunct Neptune at 29 Pisces. The Microsoft Mercury will be majorly impacted by the upcoming Saturn/Neptune conjunction in 2026. The Microsoft Pluto/Saturn midpoint is at 25 Leo conjunct transiting Mercury. Microsoft’s Solar Arc Pluto is at 25 Scorpio so it has been opposed by the recent Uranus Mars conjunction at 26 Taurus. The Uranus opposition within the bounds of Algol will be impacting it on and off over the next year particularly when Uranus goes retrograde.
It should be noted that Crowdstrike’s 2011 Sun at 14 Scorpio is inconjunct Microsoft’s Sun at 14 Aries. The Crowdstrike Uranus at 1 Aries is conjunct Microsoft’s Mercury at 0 Aries. The two companies Mars oppose each other.
My guess is that the two businesses are uneasy allies and that both are going to find the ingress of Neptune and Saturn into Aries over the next two years difficult
Hugh- thank you very much for that in depth and interesting comment. I learned a lot.
Hugh, I did about that much time in the IT ecosphere myself, and everything you say is 100% correct. Our systems weren’t affected but we’re all Unix. Not certain, but Marjorie may have posted about Microsoft some time back. Would be interesting to look at its chart.
Great post thank you
Thank you, Hugh, so much! Had no idea you were in IT; I always thought history.
Can it be said that Microsoft needs to rewrite the whole Windows code from scratch, something I think Apple did with macOS a few years ago?
Transit mercury entered the retrograde shadow zone a couple of days ago too, at 23 Leo, so it’s starting to lock in with the mars opposition Neptune in the inc chart.
Georges natal mercury in Aries was conjunct the sold eclipse last April. And mars the ruler of his mercury is in Virgo with Pluto and Uranus nearby. Planets in mercury ruled signs likely triggered by mercury retrogrades.
I know mercury isn’t always the most influential planet in terms of big events, but when I heard about this in the news today, I immediately thought it wreaked of mercury retrograde!!
Pluto in Aquarius will mean much more of this. I’m going to write to my MP and suggest we dont become a cashless society because of scenarios like these.I encourage others to do the same.
Keywords of the day are becoming business continuity and cyberresillience.
Lol