Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their workstations were refusing to reboot, resulting in speculations about 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.
Apple and AVID didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
“A lot of L.A. post shops and people out on shows having their Macs slowly crash,” reported video post-production consultant Matt Penn on Twitter.
Freelance film editor Marcus Pun reposted a message from a popular AVID Facebook user group, advising users not to turn off their workstations.
Other users reported that multiple computers at their company were affected by the issue, with social media chatter indicating that a number of different companies were affected by the issue.
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. Either way, it’s a good idea for anyone running AVID software on a Mac to back up all data right away.
Developing.