An error in the delivery of Asus updates caused thousands of users to lose access to the network
ASUS unveiled by notifying its users about a bug in patches delivered to various types of routersASUS through the automatic update delivery system.
And is that Asus users reported that their devices froze suddenly for no apparent reason and after repeatedly rebooting suddenly stopped working because device memory ran out.
The problem arose during the course of this week, and as mentioned, it was the ASUS users themselves who noticed the problem when they noticed that their routers simply no longer allowed them to connect to the internet.
The error caused massive crashes on users' devices: after automatically applying the updates, the devices would freeze after a few minutes. After the reboot, work resumed, but after some time (according to some users, 5-7 minutes), the crash was repeated.
After receiving the reports of massive router outages around the world, Asus finally explained the cause, stating that the outage was caused by "a configuration error in our server configuration file."
The problem was aggravated by the fact that ASUS recognized the problem only two days after the start of the failure, and for a long time users remained without their devices giving them access to the Internet and tried to find out the reason for themselves (something that annoyed many people).
While the company's statement doesn't explicitly state what kind of bug occurred and how exactly it affected routers remotely, a Reddit user explained that the connectivity problems were caused by a corrupt definition file for ASD ( ASUS AiProtection ).
"Updating the firmware has pretty much universally fixed this, but so does simply resetting the router to factory defaults whenever you clear the NVRAM."
In the ASUS notification, the essence of the problem is described only in general terms, it is stated that in the process of maintaining the security of the devices, an error occurred in the file with the settings of the patches transferred from the server, which which led to a violation of the normal operation of some devices.
After independently analyzing the cause of the failure, enthusiasts discovered that a damaged /jffs/asd/chknvram20230516 file was delivered to devices with rules for the asd background process ( ASUS AiProtection ), which is responsible for applying fixes to fix security issues in firmware Processing a corrupted file led to exhaustion of available free space on the file system and lack of RAM, causing the device to freeze.
It is worth mentioning that currently ASUS has already fixed the issue and removed the corrupted file from downloads sent to the devices. In most cases, a simple reboot is enough to fix the problem.
"During routine security maintenance, our technical team discovered a configuration error in our server's configuration file, which could cause a disruption in network connectivity on part of the routers," Asus said.
After resolving the glitch, most users just needed to reboot their devices; However, if that did not fix the issue, the company's support team suggested that users save their current configuration settings and perform a factory reset.
The company also apologized for the inconvenience caused.
It is mentioned that if resetting the device does not help, it is recommended to save a backup of the settings and reset the device to factory state (by holding the Reset button for 5-10 seconds until the power indicator starts blinking) .
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