Media coverage largely sucked
When I just looked at my phone, the headlines were about an unfolding Microsoft global IT outage. My first thought, ransomware. So I logged in and started looking around at what was happening — I’m a CrowdStrike customer — and quickly realised two different, separate things had happened:
- Microsoft Azure had an outage earlier in the day. This was resolved before I got up. Azure has frequent outages (don’t kill me, Microsoft) — this isn’t abnormal.
- CrowdStrike had made a boo-boo and pushed out a channel update that had borked a decent percentage of customers.
The media connected these two events together and conflated them. They weren’t connected.
Because so many people only read headlines, Beaumont should have crafted one that wouldn’t further propagate the impression that Microsoft was to blame.
(ignoring Azure’s frequent outages, don’t look at those, what do you expect a company to make products and services available and reliable or something?)