Chrome Flaw Left Some Macs Unable to Boot

By Shane McGlaun

Google has admitted an issue with Chrome is what prevented some Mac computers from being able to boot recently. The flaw that was the culprit was in Google Keystone, which controls Chrome updates. Version 1.2.13.75 of Keystone shipped with an update that damaged the macOS file system when System Integrity Protection (SIP) was disabled or not installed.

While Google has now taken ownership of the issue, the fist company and software to be blamed was Avid and its Media composer software. This was because video editors were among the first to raise the alarm as they must turn off SIP to run third-party graphics cards.

Reports indicate that the entire video editing team for ABC’s Modern Family were left unable to work because of the issues. Dozens of machines at multiple studios were reportedly impacted.

Google did offer steps to recover the machines. The steps involved booting into recovery mode and running some code in the Terminal application. That code, which can be seen on Gizmodo, will remove the affected version of the Google Software Update and restore the damaged portion of the file system.