A number of film and TV editors throughout Los Angeles on Monday evening reported that their 2013 Mac Pro workstations running macOS operating system versions between macOS 10.9 Mavericks to macOS 10.14 Mojave were unable to boot, resulting in speculation as to a possible computer virus attack. Social media reports suggested that the issue was widespread among users of Mac Pro computers running older versions of Apple’s operating system as well as Avid’s Media Composer software.
Avid said in a statement Tuesday morning that it was aware of the issue, and that its engineers had mad a top priority of resolving it. Avid CEO Jeff Rosica and CTO Tim Claman released the following video, stating that the company is “working around the clock, whatever it takes” to solve the issue and that its engineers were on site a a number of locations to solve the problem.
Apple has yet to respond to a request for comment as of late Monday.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment late Monday.
“A lot of L.A. post shops and people out on shows having their Macs slowly crash,” tweeted video post-production consultant Matt Penn.
From what I gather there’s a massive failure of Macs with iLok/Avid that’s happening all over right now. A lot of L.A. post shops and people out on shows having their Macs slowly crash and wont boot again. Engineers are looking in to it. Don’t shut your machine off. #postchat
— Matt Penn (@mattpenndotcom) September 24, 2019
Some analysis by affected users seemed to suggest that the outage may not have been caused by a virus, but by a recent software update that may have corrupted some data, with some suggesting a OS X reinstall that keeps the existing data to restart the machine.
On Tuesday afternoon, Avid’s Claman suggested that users running Avid should for the time being not reboot their computers, not install any software updates and back up all sensitive data.
A fair amount of attention has been paid to the Google Chrome Keystone updater, which is found in the following directory: ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/
The following steps have also been suggested as a means of possibly resolving the issue via the Terminal application:
1. Boot into Recovery
2. Launch Terminal
# chroot /Volumes/[affected install]
# mv var vv
# ln -s private/var var
# chflags -h restricted /var
# chflags -h hidden /var
# xattr -sw com.apple.rootless "" /var
remove launch agents from /Users/[affected user]/Library/LaunchAgents/
- com.google.keystone.agent.plist
- com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist # exit (recommended) # csrutil enable
8. Reboot
Thanks to Daniel Warren Browne for the tip to this story and we’ll keep you up to date on this as it progresses.
If you’ve seen this issue on your end, please let us know about your experience in the comments.
Via Variety, Twitter, and Mr. Macintosh