William Gallagher
The worldwide outage of Windows PCs was because of European Commission demands, says Microsoft, and we should get used to it.
The outage that closed airports, shut down hospitals, and took out television stations was actually caused because of a single Windows update. Security firm CrowdStrike pushed out a flawed update, which it admits created the problem.
However, Microsoft has now told the Wall Street Journal that the reason such an update could have a calamitous, global impact, is the fault of the European Commission. Specifically, a spokesperson said that EC agreements mean that Microsoft is not legally allowed to secure its systems the way Apple does.
Reportedly, in 2009, Microsoft agreed with the EC that it would provide equal access to Windows security developers that it has for its own teams. Therefore, CrowdStrike could push out an update without Microsoft necessarily even knowing about it.
This is Microsoft washing its hands of the issue. But it's also much more than that.
For this is Microsoft effectively saying that it allegedly cannot but certainly will not do anything to prevent this from happening again.
The Wall Street Journal notes that in 2020, Apple told security developers that they would no longer have what's called kernel access for their software. Microsoft security developers still have this type of access to Windows.
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
74 Comments
The EC once again shows how clueless grandstanding politicians can cause havoc. The EC taking lefts and rights from Apple, Meta and now Microsoft. The only way to beat these ignorant folks is to band together and that’s what looks like is exactly happening. Nice!
Did the EU make Microsoft do this worldwide?
The problem last week had nothing to do with the EU. It was sloppy coding, sloppy testing and with little to no resilience built into the whole process.
This seems to be totally a QA testing issue. Was any testing done?
Is 2009 the correct date for when Microsoft agreed to this? That would mean it took 15 years for something calamitous like the Crowdstrike update to happen.