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Global software failure hits RMV and its vehicle-inspection system

By adamg on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 9:48am

Update, 2:25 p.m.: RMV says its officers are open for appointments again but that the statewide vehicle inspection system remains offline.

The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles reports it's been hit by the same Windows security-software screwup as Mass General Brigham, which means it's had to cancel all customer-service-center appointments before noon "as many workstations at centers are not operational."

Also, the statewide vehicle-inspection system isn't working, so forget about getting your car inspected today - and you can't make payments through the RMV Web site.

Road test appointments, however, which rely on time-tested non-computerized methods dating back more than a century, however, are still on, the Registry says.

Topics: 
Driving
Technology
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RMV


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Comments

By anon on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 10:06am.

I couldn't get my car inspected for the same reason.

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By eddie van halen on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 10:13am.

dated back more than a century.

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By cybah on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 10:59am.

That's old news. The RMV upgraded almost two decades again when the registrar was our old friend Dan Grabauskas, who later left the RMV to run the MBTA. It was him who brought the 1970s RMV to the 2000s technology.

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By Friartuck on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 12:15pm.

On the Real ID I was forced to pay for at my last renewal that still doesn't work for that actual purpose

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By SwirlyGrrl on Sun, 07/21/2024 - 3:07pm.

I upgraded to the RealID when I had to renew in person a couple of years ago. It was the same price as the regular license, and worked just fine at the airport. All I had to do was print a couple of things out to bring with me.

How were you forced to pay for it? Why doesn't it work?

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By eddie van halen on Sun, 07/21/2024 - 10:23am.

It's not old news, it's called facetiousness. But the notion that Grabauskas (our old friend?) did anything unique ignores the fact that, during the time period, everything was being updated to reflect recent advances in IT. If Grabauskas wasn't in the position, it still would have happened. And some systems have been further upgraded since then. The agency likely could not be interoperable otherwise. But the organizational culture hasn't changed tremendously, and that's not facetiousness.

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By BostonDog on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 11:17am.

Seem to mostly be related to the office workstations the rank and file employees use for transactions. It's effectively as if someone took the computer off their desk last night. There's nothing for them to do until the computer can be booted.

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By ScottB on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 11:30am.

Plenty of Windows Servers also got CrowdStruck.

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By perruptor on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 12:43pm.

My software-engineer spouse says it's Microsoft Cloud. A company that maintains that screwed up, and anybody relying on the Microcloud is SOL. That seems to include all medical facilities. Tell me again why cloud computing is so great, wontcha?

Edit: Now I see Adam has posted a story explaining that it's a security-software screwup, so never mind.

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By jmeltzer on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 5:13pm.

the company is called CrowdStrike; the bug, which crashed Windows, was in an automatic software update; and it struck a big crowd of file servers.

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By brianjdamico on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 5:28pm.

Apparently unrelated, though they might have impacted some of the same systems.

Last night, an outage of Microsoft Azure occurred, which is a cloud computing platform, and that impacted Microsoft 365 services. That outage seems to have been resolved in a few hours. Then overnight, a flawed updated from CrowdStrike, who makes cybersecurity products, caused Windows systems using a cloud-based CrowdStrike security program to not be able to boot up, which once identified and corrected at the source, still required a manual, local fix on the computers that received the bad update.

Presumably there is a Venn diagram of systems that were impacted by Azure, CrowdStrike and both. And of course, to make this more confusing to those not tuned in to the finer details of what's going on here, both outages involve cloud-based platforms and Microsoft products.

From WaPo:

Microsoft said the “preliminary root cause” appeared to be “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads.” In turn, it said, that “caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.”

There was a second, more widespread issue that resulted from a faulty update from CrowdStrike, according to the companies. They believe the Azure outage is not related to the CrowdStrike one.

“Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an unsigned statement. “We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”

Early Friday, Microsoft said it had “been made aware of an issue” affecting Windows users running technology from CrowdStrike called the Falcon agent. Falcon, according to the company website, is a platform to stop online security breaches via cloud technology. It encompasses more than 10 different security and IT tools including AI technology.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/19/crowdstrike-microsoft-ou...

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By jmeltzer on Fri, 07/19/2024 - 5:08pm.

A lot of corporate sysops will be working all weekend.

Also, a lot of corporate lawyers.

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