CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.
On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
On Friday, CrowdStrike released a faulty update that rendered around 8.5 million Windows devices unusable, according to Microsoft. The update caused the affected computers to be stuck at the infamous “blue screen of death,” or BSOD, a bright blue error screen with a message that is shown when Windows crashes or cannot load because of a critical software failure.
The outage caused delays at airports in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, and London, and across the United States. It also caused several hospitals to halt surgeries, and paralyzed countless businesses all over the world.
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Citation needed.
I’ve seen reports of hospitals delaying non-essential and elective surgeries, but no reports of emergency care being impacted
Yup, the same happened during the various COVID waves. When there are more patients than they can reasonably provide care for, they triage and ensure those with the greatest need get seen.
My wife said that the nurses’ computers were down in the neonatal ICU that she works with. So they had no access to any patient’s medication lists or dosages during the outage.
Oops, never mind, you don’t even get the $10.
Did anyone actually die because of it? I couldn’t find any reports on that. Maybe that’s just because Google is useless, idk
Seriously doubt it. Elective surgeries were likely cancelled, which could certainly prolong suffering for some, but life saving surgeries can absolutely happen and do without computers.
It’s really hard to know for sure. Some percentage of elective surgeries or procedures end up detecting something life threatening. If the canceled procedures were rescheduled promptly then the outcomes probably haven’t changed in a meaningful way. But in the US, stuff is booked out months in advance so it may be impossible to get everyone rescheduled for something in the next week or two.
That’s really hard to evaluate.
There were almost certainly a meaningful number of deaths in affected facilities, but a single weekend is a short enough sample that it’s hard to say confidently without a lot of data. Stuff like temperature and air quality affects death rates, as does stuff like “it’s already been hot for a week and the patients who were most vulnerable to heat already died”. And there were a lot of tests and scans that were cancelled (or at least delayed) that would have caught something, or patients that couldn’t get admitted who should have been, or a whole host of other things that are hard to measure.
Basically, there’s enough actual variance and pseudo variance through factors that are hard to measure that it would take a pretty big swing to be definitive. But purely on the basis that quality of care is correlated to death rate and quality of care was meaningfully degraded, the reasonable assumption would be that there were some, even if providing data to back it would be extremely difficult.
I’ve heard this a lot but haven’t seen any mention of anyone dying. Do you have a source?
Even if this was true, get your facts straight before you spout bullshit:
https://www.crowdstrike.com/terms-conditions/
EDIT: OP deleted their post that said people died in hospitals because of the BSOD update, which isn’t true. Even if it was, the terms of service specifically says the software is not fault tolerant and to not use where failure could result in death. For the record, I think they’re handling this like shit
LoL
Source?
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If the system being cripple cost lives, that’s a failure of your procedures, systems, training, management and backups.
It shouldn’t take hours to override the system, why wasn’t someone on staff who was trained on the system? Why weren’t paper charts available sooner? That sounds more like negligence than a system causing an issue. If someone on staff was trained, it should have taken minutes to fix the issue.
If a crash like this cost lives, that’s your own negligence, not a computer glitches.
So a simple power outage or broken networking hardware would be enough to kill people in your hospital?…
There’s good reason that hospitals have their own backup emergency generators. A blackout absolutely would kill people.
Yes, but they typically don’t just run the whole building, only vital stuff and emergency lighting.
The patients or their families don’t even get the gift card, that goes to the hospital.
Man if a hospital gets crippled by a computer glitch, there’s something seriously wrong.
People don’t seriously believe this crap do they?
Your chart is stored on windows computers. The drug dispensing systems run on windows computers. Imaging (xray, ultrasound, CT, MRI) runs on windows machines. If a hospital used crowd strike, all of those go down. Source: i work at a major trauma center that was affected and took several hours to respond. OR, ER and ICU were completely frozen for several hours before they could pivot to paper charting. There aren’t paper backups of every chart so orders that weren’t already under way were also almost always delayed pending a verbal order from the physician.
If they aren’t printing paper already pretty sure they are being negligent of the current legislation. They have to be be able to work through minimal power, infrastructure and services already, and they have to be ready for a cyber or terrorist attack.
Sounds like your unit, if you eve work for one, is negligent in its operation.
Nope, wife works at a hospital and they don’t have a paper backup of everything. They were affected by the outage and it was apparently a pretty tough night.
They can still work, but there obviously will be a serious delay switching to paper everything. You might want to look into the legislation that you’re thinking of to see what it specifically says.
And I’m pretty sure there are ways to prevent what happened that have nothing to do with having medical professionals chart everything on both a computer and on paper. That just sounds really inefficient.
Especially for an event that might happen at most once a decade.
It’s not like it happens every other month.
Why add the “if you even work for one” part? You think this person just made that up to comment here? People do things. People who do things are online. People who are online can comment. You’re giving serious old “r/nothingeverhappens” vibes.
Because they are lying about people dying when there’s been no reported incidences.
It also doesn’t take hours to shift to paper charts, that’s only if you’re negligent, or lacked proper training. Both aren’t because of a computer malfunction, that’s a failure of your procedures and operations.
So yeah, even if the system went down, they failed to have the right backups or training. If anyone died, that’s on them, not their system. So if they claim they work for a hospital, but can’t even comprehend this? Than they’re either wholefully not equipped to work for a hospital, or they are lying.
Can’t people be called out on their clear and obvious bullshit? If people don’t, these comments will be left and up and thought to be true, when they aren’t. And people like you making these comments help perpetuate the bullshit.
So thanks for doing your part perpetuating misinformation I guess…?
I’m not going to address your whole comment, but as far as I know there’s no proof of your very first sentence.
Can you tell me about your experience switching to paper charts in a hospital when the computer system goes down?
The hospital I worked for had workstations with localized backups of the medical record system that they would use in the event of an outage. They could print from them but it wasn’t like they were printing out every single thing ahead of time. They could run on generator power and still access records without network access but if those PCs had been taken down by this issue I could see that turning into a big problem. I talked to someone that’s still there and he said they didn’t have many issues due to crowdstrike though.
Do you actually work for a hospital? None of the clinics I’ve done IT for have ever done full paper charts. In fact, that vast majority of them actively pushed to do everything digitally to save paper (and were in process of converting paper to digital charts and archiving all paper charts).
Just about every one uses something like Epic to do all charting. The closest I’ve found are for exams and specialist appointments where they have to do a lot of writing or drawing on silhouette to not physical issues.
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