Crowdstrike screw-up took down ICANN’s email
The domain name industry seemed to have dodged a bullet when it came to last Friday’s devastating worldwide computer outage, but it emerged over the weekend that at least one ear was grazed.
ICANN revealed late Friday that its email systems, hosted by an external provider, were affected by the bug, which saw millions of Windows endpoints bricked by a dodgy patch from security firm Crowdstrike.
At 2035 UTC, ICANN said: “ICANN is having email issues and we may not receive your email. ICANN’s external email vendor has been affected by today’s global IT outages”.
But by 0121 UTC Saturday, it reported: “ICANN’s email service has been restored and all email-dependent services have resumed.”
Given that ICANN often uses 2359 UTC as a cut-off point for things like public comment submissions, which are received via email, it’s easy to see how the lack of an inbox over that window could have caused some minor headaches on a different day.
I’m not aware of reports of any serious incidents in the wider domain space caused by the Crowdstrike bug. DNS resolution services do not typically rely upon the uninterrupted availability of Windows endpoints.
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