Tag: outage

Reddit appears to be back after a 4-hour-long outage

Posted on by faz_business


Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at around 12:20 p.m. PT (or possibly even earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. After four hours, it appears to be working again.

Reddit confirmed it fixed the issue and is monitoring the results, according to its status page.

We discovered the outage ourselves when attempting to visit the homepage, which displayed a black screen with the message: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. Reset reason: connection failure.” On the iOS app, we only saw the dead Snoo head, Reddit’s alien mascot. 

Over 47,000 users reported problems on Downdetector.com and many users took to X to voice their complaints, sharing images of the same connection error page that we encountered. 

TechCrunch has reached out to the company for comment.

Outage caused by CrowdStrike’s disastrous update affected 8.5 million devices

Posted on by faz_business


The global outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike on Friday affected some 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft said in a blog post. The update triggered a blue screen of death, bringing systems used by hospitals, airlines, banks and other major services temporarily to a standstill. Only machines running Windows were affected.

While the issue was mostly resolved by Friday afternoon, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are still dealing with the fallout. In the blog post on Saturday, Microsoft’s VP of Enterprise and OS Security, David Weston, wrote that the company is working with CrowdStrike to “develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix for CrowdStrike’s faulty update.” Microsoft has also called in help from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

CrowdStrike said in its own blog post on Saturday that the update — a sensor configuration update — “was designed to target newly observed, malicious named pipes being used by common C2 frameworks in cyberattacks.” Unfortunately, for devices running Windows 7.11 and above that use CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, it instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash.” The total number of devices affected worked out to be “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” according to Weston.