It is not necessarily crowdstrike's responsibility, but it should be someone's.
If I go to Home Depot to buy rope for belaying at my rock climbing center and someone falls, breaks the rope and dies, then I am on the hook for manslaughter.
Not the rope manufacturer, who clearly labeled the packaging with "do not use in situations where safety can be endangered". Not the retailer, who left it in the packaging with the warning, and made no claim that it was suitable for a climbing safety line. But me, who used a product in a situation where it was unsuitable.
If I instead go to Sterling Rope and the same thing happens, fault is much more complicated, but if someone there was sufficiently negligent they could be liable for manslaughter.
In practice, to convict of manslaughter, you would need to show an individual was negligant. However, our entire industry is bad at our job, so no individual involved failed to perform their duties to a "reasonable" standard.
Software engineering is going to follow the path that all other disciplines of meatspace engineering did. We are going to kill a lot of people; and every so often, enough people will die that we add some basic rules for safety critical software, until eventually, this type of failure occuring without gross negligence becomes nearly unthinkable.
Its on whoever runs the hospitals computer systems - allowing a ring 0 kernel driver to update ad-hoc from the internet is just sheer negligence.
Then again, the management that put this in are probably also the same idiots that insist on a 7 day lead time CAB process to update a typo on a brochure ware website "because risk".
This patient is dead. They would not have been if the computer system was up. It was down because of CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike had a duty of care to ensure they didn't fuck over their client's systems.
I'm not even beyond two degrees of seperation here. I don't think a court'll have trouble navigating it.
If that really were how it worked, I don’t think that software would really exist at all. Open Source would probably be the first to disappear too — who would contribute to, say, Linux, if you could go to jail for a pull request you made because it turns out they were using it in a life or death situation and your code had a bug in it. That checks all the same boxes that your scenario does: someone is dead, they wouldn’t be if you didn’t have a bug in your code.
Now, a tort is less of a stretch than a crime, but thank goodness I’m not a lawyer so I don’t have to figure out what circumstances apply and how much liability the TOS and EULAs are able to wash away.
When I read something like this that has such a confident tone while being incredibly incorrect all I can do is shake my head and try to remember I was young once and thought I knew it all as well.
