Written by
Rivers Wong
A serious macOS corruption happened to Hollywood studios whose Mac Pros refuse to reboot and crash Monday. It was reported Avid as the fault for the issue initially, while later was confirmed by Google that a recent Google Chrome update is the culprit.
Resource: threatpost.com
Google claims Tuesday evening that an update to its Chrome browser is responsible for this data corruption. It's still unclear how exactly Avid is connected to this issue. One convincing theory is that the bug hit video editors the hardest because many of them had to disable System Integrity Protection to work with external audio and video devices that are common in professional editing setups. This update damages some macOS file systems and many Macs users are facing booting problems.
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- Check our guide to recover data from Mac that won't boot
"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." According to a Google employee's words in a forum post.
This issue will mainly affect computers that had Apple's System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled and machines that do not support SIP. System Integrity Protection is an Apple technology that is meant to ensure that malicious software doesn't corrupt core system files. Hence, if users have disabled the SIP, this Chrome update would corrupt the computer's file system, making it impossible to reboot.
Up to now, Google has called a halt on the release of the new update. For those who have installed the update and get Mac crashed or stuck, Google has put forward to the solutions to the recovery as well by running the following terminal in macOS Recovery mode and then rebooting. chroot /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD
rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle
mv var var_back
ln -sh private/var var
chflags -h restricted /var
chflags -h hidden /var
xattr -sw com.apple.rootless "" /var
This is what is known for now. We'll update this news when Google has finalized an update without bugs.
