Southwest Airlines, the fourth largest airline in the US, is seemingly unaffected by the problematic CrowdStrike update that caused millions of computers to BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) because it used Windows 3.1. The CrowdStrike issue disrupted operations globally after a faulty update caused newer computers to freeze and stop working, with many prominent institutions, including airports and almost all US airlines, including United, Delta, and American Airlines, needing to stop flights.
Windows 3.1, launched in 1992, is likely not getting any updates. So, when CrowdStrike pushed the faulty update to all its customers, Southwest wasn’t affected (because it didn’t receive an update to begin with).
The airlines affected by the CrowdStrike update had to ground their fleets because many of their background systems refused to operate. These systems could include pilot and fleet scheduling, maintenance records, ticketing, etc. Thankfully, the lousy update did not affect aircraft systems, ensuring that everything airborne remained safe and were always in control of their pilots.
I’m inclined to believe this post, claiming this article is BS https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/112825798853315264
Yes, the update bricked the systems, meaning the software that powers their business was unaccessible, reinstalling any version of windows would not restore the software built on top of the os. Thus why it became a huge ordeal rather than a simple update push from Microsoft, a bricked system can’t receive a fix remotely.
🤯
Hang on, if you’re using CrowdStrike but not getting the updates, then why are you using it at all?
Because none of these journalists have a basic understanding of what actually happened lol
Windows 3.1? You fancy kids, and your modern operating systems! What’s wrong with Windows 1.0???
Why not Quick and Dirty Operating System?
In before OS/2
inb4 os/5
This is the “can’t get a Word Document macro virus because I use the Corel WordPerfect Document type” kind of energy.
Ah, nothing’s wrong with WordPerfect, honestly. Still better than Word.
Maybe don’t pay a company to install a rootkit on your critical infrastructure?
Just open up your critical infrastructure to the public Internet and you’ll get rootkits for free.
That makes fuckall sense.
Windows 3.1 not being updated by Microsoft has nothing to do with Crowdstrike rolling out an update to their Falcon Sensor software including a file with 42kB of zeroes.
On Windows 3.1 you probably can’t run Falcon Sensor, so in that way it could be related. But it seems way more likely that Southwest Airlines simply didn’t use Falcon Sensor on their normal Windows 10 or whatever clients.
There are probably competitors to Crowdstrike, at least some companies would be customers to one of them.
I thought everyone already switched to 3.11
And they can play JezzBall.
windows downfall began when they removed jezzball. prove me wrong.
Is this actually confirmed anywhere though? I keep seeing it repeated and the only ‘source’ is a ?xeet? .
This… Doesn’t make me feel any better about flying Southwest
i don’t think there’s any possible way to feel better about flying southwest
i think you accedentaly put southwest instead of spirit.
Spirit is already a non starter for me because my legs don’t fit in the seat haha
If they still use Windows 3.1 and it works, then I do have to wonder about the rest of their security setup.
Windows 3.1 can’t use modern versions of tls which means it’s effectively impossible to network it securely.
You just know there’s an SMB share somewhere with no password, where files filled with unencrypted customer details get dumped for processing by an ancient AS400 server.
Everything we know about this is that it was a disaster waiting to happen. Why the heck aren’t the airlines using Linux instead of Windows for critical stuff? How about something like…Chrome OS? Then you don’t need CrowdStrike because your OS is already secure because of the built in VMs and because it is Linux. Pay google for support and no updates unless there is something critical.
This is both awesome and frightening for many reasons
Windows 3.1 didn’t have the BSOD. It just froze. I remember with Windows NT 4, when we first got the BSOD, being so grateful that Microsoft decided to actually tell us that our computer wasn’t going to recover from the error. Otherwise, we’d just be sitting there, waiting, hoping it would unfreeze itself.
It never did
I think that NT 3.51 had a blue screen of death
Windows 3.1 did have a BSOD. It wasn’t always fatal, you could try to hit enter to go back to Windows, but most of the time it wasn’t really recoverable, Windows often wouldn’t work right afterwards.
I ran into them all the time in 3.11 on our 486 which had some faulty RAM (the BSOD would even be scrambled). If we could get back to Windows after that, it’d just be in a zombie state where moving the mouse around would paint stuff over whatever was left on screen, and wouldn’t respond to clicks or keypresses.
Fun times.
IIRC Windows 95 did that as well
Are you sure? I remember a long time ago being able to trigger a BSOD by opening Windows Calculator and dividing any number by 0. And I’m pretty sure that was 3.1 or 3.11.
In fact, I remember being able to change the color of the BSOD.
As another user mentioned, the BSOD first came in Windows NT 3.51.
But it definitely wasn’t in Windows 3.1 or Windows 3.11
😄it still do that on my over 20y old 2gig RAM Arch KDE on wayland macBookPro 🤔
