Whos responsible for CrowdStrike crisis – Administrators or CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike are clearly to blame. They shipped bad code, which is inexcusable. Grant that review may not have caught the bug, because Windows kernel-mode development is magic; but testing would have caught it.

Admins must be able to trust gold bits, because they certainly cannot trust bits that are not gold.

This a false dichotomy, isn't it? It's an interesting formulation of the question anyway. It gives the choice of assigning blame to the large abstract entity of Crowdstrike or the individual in the IT admin. Pretty asymmetrical.

Microsoft for deciding in 2016 to give access to the kernel. Lending out the keys to your house comes with risks.

My view is that the responsibility, and therefore blame, is shared between CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and IT admins.

My view is that it is the system administrators are responsible for the crisis not Crowdstrike the company.

For me a complicated IT system is like a ship which is going to be at sea for years without the possibility for docking into a port for repairs. The ship's engineers had better be responsible for every aspect of the ship's operation that is directly within their control.

IT administrators are like those engineers. As administrators its their responsible to ensure that nothing that goes on the computers cannot cause a problem they can't revert, unless it is something installed by hardware vendors they have absolutely no control over, and this doesn't seem to be one of them.

IT administrators should accept responsibility for this incident. They messed up bad.

The only thing that should be slowing down recovery is the ability of IT admins to log into the remote systems and fix them, or their ability to go from desk to desk and fixing them via ready prepared disks.

If they insist that management railroaded them into installing this software against their better judgement they should better have those complaints in writing.

For my part it reflects the danger of monocultures, something well understood by biologists, but poorly understood by IT bosses or management.

'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

Could it be that be CIOs and IT admins are pressured into doing such stuff again their better judgement, because some salesmen managed to talk their bosses into the crap they were peddling, probably with some regulatory and financial incentivisation?