Microsoft Update Crash Crippled The World & EVERY AT&T User Exposed In Massive Data Leak

A minor glitch in a software update last week caused chaos for the banking industry, airlines, and hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Plus, according to AT&T, the company recently suffered a massive data breach that exposed call and text message data for almost all of their customers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A minor glitch in the software update last week caused chaos for the banking industry. Airlines and hundreds of millions of people across the globe could not get where they wanted to go. This massive outage could have been avoided, but the company's responsible have sent millions convincing regulators to back off. We're doing fine. We don't need any help. We don't need any regulations. Well, look, it's so apparent. You've got Microsoft that is trying to blame this on.
Yeah. They're saying the CrowdStrike update.
The CrowdStrike. Yeah. Okay. Well, no, that is nonsense. The truth is, the federal government said to Microsoft, and they said to Amazon, and they said to Google, you guys have a big problem because you own everything. There's no diversity in the cloud system. Everything's going into the cloud and being controlled by companies that don't have the capacity to do it. And they said, no, if you do that, you're gonna interfere with innovation. We've got this. Don't worry about this regulator. We've got it under control. You think back, it was the same thing with railroads. This is the closest to the railroad monopoly that I've ever seen. And for some reason, we act like it's different. It's exactly the same thing. They need to be busted up. You can't have these people controlling all this.
Right. The FTC has been on Microsoft's back for over a year telling them, hey, this is gonna cause a problem. We really need to have some hearings about this. We need you guys to respond. And every Microsoft response was, you guys are overreacting. Everything is perfectly fine. Who do you think you're talking to here? We've got this under control. In fact, as recently as two days before the outage, the federal regulators were warning, something horrible is going to happen because you have not diversified. It is so consolidated that something as simple as a software update crippled the world.
Yeah, understand, an update. This was run the update and everything stopped. And the point, this is a massive threat to the economy.
It is.
I mean, if somebody figured out how to make this an element of war, we'd be in big trouble.
Well, and I guarantee you, after seeing what happened, they're working on it. They absolutely are working on it.
No question. So you have this argument, you can't regulate us. We're so smart. We have a security system. They knew they didn't have a security system. Matter of fact, it showed they didn't want to spend money on the security system. It would've cost them too much money to do what the government was telling 'em to do. You have to have a security system. And they lied, basically. They absolutely made up this lie that we've got it under control. There's nothing to worry about and that the consolidation of our companies, there should be no limits. If it's Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, we should be able to control the world of tech. And you see how dangerous this is. It's just so freaking dangerous.
Well, honestly, I think you bring up a really great point here with the arrogance of these companies. Look, we're the tech guys. We're so much smarter than everybody else. You can't sit there in Washington, DC, with your law degree and tell us how to run a tech company. You don't know anything about this. Well, they know enough to have warned you for years that this would happen. You dismissed it and then it happened. But they've also spent so many millions of dollars lobbying these same organizations and lawmakers to not do anything about it, that it probably would've been cheaper just to invest in the security than buying everybody off.
That's an interesting point. If you look at the multi-millions of dollars that they paid to politicians to make 'em vote their way. And you just said, okay, let's regroup on that. Could we have done what the government was telling us we needed to do?

[zonker]

Letting large multi nationals regulate themselves what could possible go wrong?

[Ellimist-xq]

Regulations promote innovation, while corporations argue the opposite

[mcwolfbeast]

I'm sorry but speaking as an IT security professional you cannot pin the Crowdstrike failure on Microsoft. Microsoft wasn't even involved. It was the companies like Delta, the hospitals and banks and everyone else affected by this who chose to use Crowdstrike, and their IT departments should have known the risks of how it operated through necessary auditing and vetting of software installed on mission-critical systems. Microsoft wasn't involved in the installation of third party software, nor in how it updates itself (actually bypassing Microsoft's normal QA and digital signing -- that was Crowdstrike's fault!). While you are correct that centralization and consolidation in the IT market into tech giants is a serious problem, you shouldn't use this as an example because you're completely missing the target, and aren't helping people to understand what was actually going on.

[rb]

This is a "Homeland Security" issue.
This is a national security issue.

[balmpatchvideos]

Wow how sick I am of these OLIGARCH SOBS

[pauljansen]

What a shock....our lifes are ruled by computers....didn't see this panic over failing computer systems coming🙄

[gbprime]

For those of you who think Microsoft is to blame on this one... if you wrote something that was full of grammatical errors, would you blame the English language for your failure?

That's essentially what we're doing here. Microsoft provides the framework that other people use to write things. Yes, they changed some rules and added some new ones, but the problems were caused by people who wrote things without actually understanding what the rules were.

[jameshurley]

The first outage was caused by cloud strike, the second one was a bad update that effected all 365 components.... Microsoft is to blame because they failed to do what any normal business would do before rolling out a update to their network of systems. They got no excuses

[Frederick-inrz]

How much of this can be attributed to corporate greed

[scooby]

humans are gonna be the demise of humans..

[reh]

Software engineer here. As much as I hate Microsoft and monopolies, this wasn't the fault of either. This issue was directly caused by a CrowdStrike update. EVERYONE in the tech. industry knows it. I don't know how you can say, "oh, no, this isn't CrowdStrike's fault. It's Microsoft's." Your assertion comes from a place of zero technical knowledge. Seriously, if the right said something this wrong and boneheaded, you'd be all over them.

[thisithis]

Microsoft beat the government before when they were declared a monopoly before. And yet nothing happened back then. Man, I would love to see Microsoft broken up. They beat it before, and I hope they don't beat it again.🙁

[smiffy]

Microsoft were not responsible.
Maybe you should get your great-grandkids to tell you what happened.

[mesektet]

“Interfering with innovation”
That’s right up there with if I go to bed early you’re stunk tung my creativity!’.

[dschledermann]

The fact that Microsoft hasn't been forced to split up long time ago is beyond ridiculous. They've been consistently abusing various monopolies since the late 90's.

[jerrydellasala]

Sorry guys, but I wish you knew what you were talking about. Yes, there might be some regulation on MS, Google, and Apple, but be careful. It took decades for the breakup of AT&T to actually make sense. But if there is any regulation I hope they understand the technology better than you.
The data breach has nothing to do with the main subject.

[chriscole]

FFS do your damn research! I love Farron's content but this is the second time y'all are getting the Crowdstrike thing wrong.

[syliagray]

I never thought about how crashes like this are also why monopolies are bad. When one entity monopolize an entire industry, and then they go down, their whole system will crash, and everyone gets affected.

[independent-tsys]

My phone has been hit by something like a sim swap. I can tell.

[AnnieWarbux]

We NEED Regulation, NOW!! There should have been since Day One!!🤨