Earlier this week, studios and video shops in Hollywood and around the country went into collective panic mode when their Mac Pro workstations refused to reboot.
News started hitting Twitter September 24 as Mac Pros started slowly crashing and refusing to boot up again. Almost immediately, keen-eyed users started noticing that affected systems were running older versions of macOS, as well as Avid’s Media Composer. In addition to a statement by the company, Avid’s CEO Jeff Rosica and its CTO Tim Claman released a video promising their engineers were working “around the clock” to address the problem.
Despite fears the issues might be caused by a virus, by Wednesday, September 25 Google Chrome had been identified as the culprit. On Google’s Chrome Help site, a support manager made the statement:
“We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled, including machines that do not support SIP. We’ve paused the release while we finalize a new update that addresses the problem.”
This comes on the heels of a recent, high-profile article in the Washington Post labeling Chrome as spyware and encouraging individuals to switch to Firefox. Meanwhile, both Firefox and Apple have increased their privacy efforts in a clear shot across Google’s bow.
While users may be willing to trade privacy for convenience, Google may have a harder time getting people to stay with Chrome if it gets a reputation for corrupting expensive workstations.