Chrome was finally behind Avid's “horribilis” week

At the beginning of the week, numerous post-production companies around the world saw their Mac Pros continually crashing. Although the first suspicions were directed at Media Composer, it has finally been proven that it was a version of Chrome that caused the crashes.

Avid has experienced one of the most complicated weeks in its long history. At the beginning of the week, numerous post-production companies around the world saw their Mac Pro computers continually crashing. As these are studies in which Avid Media Composer is the most widespread publisher, the North American company immediately found itself in the spotlight.

Once the problem was detected, Avid posted on Twitter that it was “aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products.”

Yesterday, Wednesday, it was finally learned that Avid was unrelated to the crashes in the Mac Pro since the cause would come from a Chrome update. Google confirmed that an update of Chrome “may have been shipped with an error that corrupts the file system on MacOS machines.” Google has discontinued its publication and provided instructions to affected users.

Avid highlights that it has not received any reports of data loss from affected customers. "From the beginning, when this issue was made known to Avid, our teams actively worked with customers, Apple, and partners to identify solutions and communicate them to customers. At this time, Avid's most affected customers have recovered from this issue by reinstalling their MacOS. Avid has not received any incident reports from customers running on non-Mac operating systems. To reiterate, this was not an Avid issue, as some media outlets initially reported," the company says.
“We are proud of the coordinated response from Avid, Apple and our partners and jointly thank our customers for their patience, support and assistance as we work to quickly resolve this issue,” they add.

Jeff Rosica, CEO of Avid, said: "Avid is pleased that the reboot issue some customers are facing has been resolved, and while Avid products are not the root cause, we are intensely focused on getting all of our customers back online and back to work. Over the past 36 hours, extensive due diligence work in close collaboration with Apple, PACE and other partners has exhausted all options and we have landed in the right place as quickly as possible. Special thanks go to the customer community and Avid users for the support they have given us during this time, especially those who welcomed our engineers into their studios to troubleshoot.”