Delta is having a hard time recovering after Crowdstrike failures
Delta Air Lines was forced to cancel nearly 3,000 flights from Friday till Sunday as a result of a security breach, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a public letter. Several Delta applications run on Microsoft Windows, causing several of the tools to be impacted in the outage, he added. Delta offered travel waivers to customers on flights impacted by the outage.
Meta’s New Llama 3.1 is free, powerful, and risky
Internet company Meta has announced the release of Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source artificial intelligence model. It claims that the model’s performance outperforms the GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It added a feature that could generate images based on someone’s specific likeness, one of the ways it’s making the llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages.
The world’s computers crashed because of a bad CrowdStrike Update
A security firm CrowdStrike said a recent update to a sensor configuration in Windows systems caused the global outages. It said the update, which was downloaded from 04:09 am to 05:25 pm (IST), caused a system crash that was caused by an OS crash. The update is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipes”, it added.
Microsoft is having an outage that affects flights and banking around the world
A global IT outage on Friday led to a disruption in the services of at least 8.5 million Windows devices, including those of government agencies and businesses, Microsoft said. The outages are being felt across the globe, including in India, Japan, the UK, the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.
Don’t get sucked into crowd strike outage scam
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Friday said the security firm is “actively working” with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. The issue isn’t linked to a cyberattack, he said. Systems are showing an error message that says, “ItLooks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” while giving users the option to restart the PC.
Hospitals around the world are struggling because of the IT crisis
Several US-based healthcare organisations were affected by a software update that caused their systems to crash. A WIRED reporter found both Baylor hospital network and Quest Diagnostics unable to process routine bloodwork. It could take days to weeks to get the issue fixed, as administrators may have physical access to the device. Some systems may be unrecoversable, but the majority will be recovered.
Big tech backing Trump is inevitability
Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, in a podcast released this week, said that their decision to support Donald Trump for the US Presidential election was the result of “the final straw” presented by Joe Biden’s Budget proposal. “The only big policy platform he had were sweeping tax cuts, which was a huge giveaway to corporations,” they added.
CrowdStrike Update crashed the world’s computers
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in an interview said, “We are working with customers impacted by the defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” He added, “The issue is not linked to a cyberattack.” Earlier on Friday, millions of machines globally were unable to run Windows operating system because of a bug in CrowdStrike’s software.
Banks, airlines and broadcasters are being offline due to a major Windows BSOD issue
Several global organisations are facing outages due to a bug in CrowdStrike’s Windows software update that caused many IT issues. UK-based Sky News has said its morning news bulletins are currently unable to be broadcast and that it is experiencing a “third party” IT issue. Ryanair, one of the biggest airlines in Europe, also said it’s experiencing a “third-party” IT issue.
Bob Newhart is holding up
Bob Newhart, the American comedian who died aged 94 on Thursday, was known for his stand-up routines. He had worked in advertising for longer than he did as an accountant. Newhart rocketed to the top because he was able to understand a Middle American type of man: the Everyman, who is overwhelmed by a world that sometimes seems weird.