Avid Responds to Mac Pro Shutdowns

BURLINGTON, MASS--Avid is responding to reports that emerged out of some Hollywood studios Monday that some Apple Mac Pros running Avid Media Composer were failing to reboot or were "slowly crashing," according to a report in Variety. Some editors took to social media to advise users to not reboot their machines and to backup all of their data. Some users online speculated that the cause could be a virus attack affecting Media Composer 8.8 operating on 6.1 Mac Pro and running prior versions of MacOS on Sierra.  

Avid issued this statement:

"Avid is aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products which arose late yesterday. This issue is top priority for our engineering and support teams, who have been working diligently to determine and resolve the root cause. As we learn more, we will immediately publish information—directly to our customers and via our community forums and social media platforms—in order to resolve this issue for all affected customers and prevent any further issues."

Avid also released a video on Tuesday featuring Avid's CEO and President, Jeff Rosica, that offers tips to users that may be impacted by the shutdowns. Watch the video below.

UPDATE 9/25: Avid released a press release saying that it identified the root cause of the issue and that it "is unrelated to Avid and its creative tools." The release says that Google confirmed that a Chrome update may have been shipped with a bug that damages files on macOS machines. Google has announced it is pausing its release, as well as provided instructions to affected users. Avid also reports that no data was lost by affected customers.

In the press release Rosica says: "Avid is pleased that the reboot issue facing some customers is solved and while Avid products are not the root cause, we're keeping an intense focus on bringing all of our customers back online and back to work. Over the past 36 hours, the deep dive of due diligence working closely with Apple, PACE and other partner exhausted all options and we've landed in the right place as quickly as possible. We owe our special thanks to Avid's customer and user community for their typically strong show of support at this time, especially to those who welcomed our engineers into their studios."

Apple has not commented yet. 

Tom Butts

Tom has covered the broadcast technology market for the past 25 years, including three years handling member communications for the National Association of Broadcasters followed by a year as editor of Video Technology News and DTV Business executive newsletters for Phillips Publishing. In 1999 he launched digitalbroadcasting.com for internet B2B portal Verticalnet. He is also a charter member of the CTA's Academy of Digital TV Pioneers. Since 2001, he has been editor-in-chief of TV Tech (www.tvtech.com), the leading source of news and information on broadcast and related media technology and is a frequent contributor and moderator to the brand’s Tech Leadership events.