LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“On the CrowdStrike Incident” by Zvi


Listen Later

Things went very wrong on Friday.

A bugged CrowdStrike update temporarily bricked quite a lot of computers, bringing down such fun things as airlines, hospitals and 911 services.

It was serious out there.

Ryan Peterson: Crowdstrike outage has forced Starbucks to start writing your name on a cup in marker again and I like it.

What (Technically) Happened

My understanding it was a rather stupid bug, a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

Zack Vorhies: Memory in your computer is laid out as one giant array of numbers. We represent these numbers here as hexadecimal, which is base 16 (hexadecimal) because it's easier to work with… for reasons.

The problem area? The computer tried to read memory address 0x9c (aka 156).

Why is this bad?

This is an invalid region of memory for any program. Any program that [...]

---

Outline:

(00:31) What (Technically) Happened

(03:38) Who to Blame?

(06:58) How Did We Let This Happen

(12:41) Regulatory Compliance

(18:14) Consequences

(19:54) Careful With That AI

(29:34) Unbanked

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:

July 22nd, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oAKfaxKKfuz2cuRLr/on-the-crowdstrike-incident

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,420 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,387 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

7,893 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,126 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

87 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Your Undivided Attention

1,458 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,040 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

87 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

390 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,431 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,216 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

474 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

121 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

75 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

459 Listeners