Data Backup Digest

Macintosh computers are generally known for their performance, efficiency, and reliability. They're useful for everyday activities, like checking your email, browsing the Internet, and playing games – and they're the industry standard for professions like audio design, video editing and other, CPU-intensive applications.

As such, you can imagine the panic when thousands of Mac Pro computers – primarily running older versions of Apple OS – failed to boot. Instead, users were suddenly left with a very expensive paperweight.

'''What's the Issue?'''

Per original reports, the potential culprit was named as Avid's popular Media Composer software – a tool that is used by many for audio and video editing. It seemed that the two seems were suddenly refusing to get along.

In a more recent update, however, it was unveiled that a new update to Google's Chrome web browser was likely to blame. While the first reports of an issue started to surface, primarily around Hollywood due to its overabundance of film editors, it was several days before the true problem was revealed.

The development team with Google took responsibility in a blog post by stating, in part: "We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on MacOS machines. We’ve paused the release while we finalize a new update that addresses the problem."

Moreover, Jeff Rosica, CEO with Avid, responded to Google's statement by saying: "Avid is pleased that the reboot issue facing some customers is solved and while Avid products are not the root cause, we’re keeping an intense focus on bringing all of our customers back online and back to work. We owe our special thanks to Avid’s customer and user community for their typically strong show of support at this time, especially to those who welcomed our engineers into their studios to troubleshoot."

Thankfully, the damage and fallout of the event was minimal. But this does highlight several important issues – including the vulnerability of today's Macs and the problem with software updates today. When these tweaks haven't been properly tested and vetted by the developers, issues like this are bound to arise. The problems are only compounded when such updates are forced onto users.

Macs have also faced a lot of scrutiny due to potential security flaws. While there was a time when Macs were considered to be more secure than Windows-based machines, experts are slowly backing down on this stance. It seems that no platform – neither Mac nor Windows – is safe from malware and similar issues.

Although this particular incident wasn't due to malware, and was in fact the result of a bad update file, it should serve as a wakeup call to all Mac users – your system isn't as safe as it once was.

For more information on Google Chrome, one of the most popular web browsers in use today, please visit their official website at www.google.com/chrome. To find out more information about Avid Media Composer, head over to their official site at www.avid.com.