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.
This software is shit Bob! What should we do Bob?
Well Bob, we should find something compatible with shit!
Bob, I think I got it! I got this other shit software!
Genius Bob! Just Genius! 😎
🤯
This is both awesome and frightening for many reasons
And they can play JezzBall.
windows downfall began when they removed jezzball. prove me wrong.
So…Battlestar Galactica scenario?
lol
I love such things in Star Wars too.
And not sure whether there’s been a plot play with the Katana fleet (all ships were slaved to the flagship, all crews including that of the flagship caught a virus causing them to go mad and die, and while they were still alive, the fleet jumped in unknown direction ; it was found later and ships reused by sides of the civil war) where its obsolete electronics and software were actually an advantage security-wise.
Though in that universe it seems that interfacing and integrating wildly different systems is more or less a normal thing, since there are lots of planets, lots of races and some things still in operation are few centuries old.
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.
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
Windows 3.1 absolutely did have a BSoD, and as the other person mentioned, sometimes you could press a key and the OS would recover. More often than not you needed to reboot, though. Our family PC would BSoD all the damn time, and I had to put up with it throughout a good portion of my early childhood until my dad finally bought a Windows 98 SE PC. But that OS also had its fair share of instability issues. The “illegal operation” error message was a near-daily occurance.
It wasn’t until we got our first NT-based machine (XP) that we stopped having constant issues with Windows. The DOS-based Windows OSes were notoriously unstable.
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
The other user is wrong. I clearly remember the BSoD in Windows 3.1. You can find it easily with a simple web search. Here it is:
Hell, there were even memes of it:
Edit: I provided proof and was still downvoted lol. This place is quickly turning into reddit.
😄it still do that on my over 20y old 2gig RAM Arch KDE on wayland macBookPro 🤔
I think that NT 3.51 had a blue screen of death
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.
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
because Boeing or why?
Wait till you hear of how much COBOL in industries…
Old programming languages are fine. Hard to maintain though. But they all compile down to machine code at the end of the day.
Old operating systems on the other hand means they are vulnerable to all kinds of exploits that have been discovered in that OS over the past few decades. That’s a much bigger problem.
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
Is this actually confirmed anywhere though? I keep seeing it repeated and the only ‘source’ is a ?xeet? .
Same, I’m pretty sure it’s not true.
Ahhhh, the Technology Trap. The modern world has become a mere handful of bad zeros away from having this house of cards crash down and kill almost everyone.
Technology is great and makes our modern society comfy and great. But it also can be the Sword of Damocles. When will that slender thread break and kill us all?
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
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 I was eating an onion… Nope.
I thought everyone already switched to 3.11
