NEW YORK, NY – A highly respected antivirus program malfunctioned and caused problems nationwide!
McAfee Inc. acknowledged that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. The company has gone ahead and posted a replacement update for download.
The less than optimal antivirus update disabled hundreds of thousands of computers on Wednesday. The glitch, according to McAfee, only affected a small fraction of its corporate customers which caused some Windows XP Service PAck 3 systems to crash and reboot repeatedly. McAfee has blamed a bad virus definition update for the problem.
“We’re investigating how it was possible some customers were impacted and some not,” said Joris Evers, a McAfee spokesman.
Intel was one of the companies affected. “There were quite a few clients, laptops, and PCs affected,” said Chuck Mulloy, spokesman for Intel. “We are able to get it stopped fairly early on, but clearly not soon enough.
Although McAfee has promised to not only fix the problem, but to never allow it to happen again, the damage has been done. The glitch demonstrated “a complete failure in their quality control process,” said Amrit Williams, CTO with systems management vendor BigFix.
McAfee is not a highly respected antivirus program. It lets viruses through their wall and now this? It stinks.