WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A fast-moving computer worm Tuesday shut down computer systems using Microsoft operating software, hitting computer systems across the United States and reportedly in Germany and Asia.

Among those hit were offices on Capitol Hill and media organizations, including CNN, ABC and The New York Times. The Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Illinois, reportedly also had problems.

While the worm primarily affects Windows 2000, it also can affect some early versions of Microsoft XP, said Johannes Ullrich, director of the Sans Institute, a network security firm based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Symptoms include the repeated shutdown and rebooting of a computer.

Microsoft has a patch on its Web site, Microsoft.com, for users to download, a company spokesperson said. The spokesperson told CNN that Microsoft would not estimate how many users have been affected and described the problem as low-impact.

Lysa Myers, a virus researcher for the computer security firm McAfee, said the worm exploits a vulnerability in a Microsoft plug-and-play application. "How it's spreading is it's looking for machines that are unpatched and running itself," she said.

What was causing the damage was unclear, although experts pointed to a new worm called worm-rbot.cbq.

Here we go again! Another Microsoft vulnerability, another case of thousands of man hours and who knows how many dollars lost. I don't know about you, but the biggest worm to me is Microsoft itself, who has been shoving crap down our throats for years, getting rich off of it, and then saying "oops," when something like this happens.

I can't feel too bad about today's victims though, anyone who is still running Windows 2000 was asking for trouble. Windows XP is a lousy OS, and since I installed Service Pack Two, I have had major problems with bluetooth, and incompatibilities with a number of applications, but in the world we live in,I had little choice. It is keep putting band aids on XP, or move to Linux, since buying a new Mac is not in the cards for right now. But days like today make me nostalgic for my OSX days.

Looks like I am not the only one a little critical of Microsoft:

The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same. Complaints about Microsoft compliance (or lack thereof) with Web browser standards have been a universal refrain for nearly a decade. And today, even with word of a possible truce in the long-running battle between the company and Web developers, many bloggers remain highly skeptical, to say the least.

Some forgiving souls are choosing to remain optimistic or take a more neutral wait-and-see approach. But they appear vastly outnumbered by vocal critics, many of whom are advocating a controversial call for a boycott of Internet Explorer.

Blog community response:

"Seeing behavior from Microsoft that looks a lot like standards compliance raises hopes. Perhaps Microsoft can grow to assume the responsibilities it should shoulder as the industry leader and stop trying to monopolize markets with 'Embrace-Enhance-Extend-Extinguish' tactics. Or perhaps I'm just a hopeless optimist..."
--Ted's Radio Weblog

"This is just another example of Microsoft trying to dictate standards to the rest of the world, most of the time to their advantage. Do yourself a favor, keep using Firefox!"
--In Search of Utopia

"I've been running Mozilla?s Firefox at my house for well over 6 months and I'm never looking back. I've gone one step further and totally removed Internet Explorer from all my system. Internet Explorer (IE) is NOT A WEB STANDARD BROWSER. It never was and it may never be."
-- theMcMurray's Blog

"You'd think then that Redmond, which is gearing up to ship the first upgrade to the ubiquitous browser in years (see 'IE7 mascot a slavering foxhound'), would be making every effort to ensure that IE7 aces Acid2, a test page written by the Web Standards Project to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web standards. Not so."
--Good Morning Silicon Valley

It also appears ISOU is getting a look by quite a few folks in the mainstream political and technical press...

From Publish Online:

Opinion: There are different theories about why Microsoft is not implementing W3C standards, but the sad truth is that Web developers have to build sites with IE in mind. Microsoft is about to release IE 7.0, and if you've been hoping that this new release would solve your development problems, prepare to be disappointed.

Besides the obvious issues with an X.0 release of anything, word has it that the new browser won't fully support CSS2 standards.

So what else is new?

Since the beginning, those of us who make Web sites for a living have had to contend with various implementations of Web "standards." We've coded and canoodled and hacked and browser-detected in order to get our pages to render correctly in the plethora of browsers our users came to us with.

When Microsoft pretty much won the Browser War and Netscape faded into relative obscurity, it seemed that at least if we didn't have the best browser to deal with at least we had pretty much one browser to deal with.
Then along came Firefox (and Opera, to be fair), and all of a sudden we were back in the trenches again. To everyone's surprise it turned out that Firefox was a pretty nifty browser that adhered to the open standards and worked really, really well. Subsequently it caught on like wildfire, and Microsoft began to see their market share get eaten away again.

And now here comes IE 7.0, and we're again going to be faced with a dilemma. Considering Microsoft's overwhelming share of the market (and the fact that their browser is integrated into everything that goes on inside Windows), we're going to have to continue to deal with the limitations of a substandard browser. I use the word "substandard" advisedly, because IE7.0 is coming in below the standard that the WC3 has put forth.

This is just another example of Microsoft trying to dictate standards to the rest of the world, most of the time to their advantage. Do yourself a favor, keep using Firefox!