Tangled Up in Blue Screen
Late last night, as I am wont to do, I was cruising the internet to determine what would be today’s big headline: Trump’s Trumpian RNC acceptance speech or Biden’s decision about staying in the race. It turns out the answer is neither. What did it take to momentarily dislodge the relentless, breathless coverage of politics from its prime real estate everywhere from top news sites to the recesses of our sleepless unconscious? It would obviously take a lot. So try this on for size. Airlines grounded, passengers stranded at airports and unable to check into hotels because their systems were down, some airlines checking people in by hand, 911 services across many states not working, people cut off from their bank accounts, hospital systems crippled, surgeries delayed, Times Square billboards gone dark, major news organizations knocked off the air, retailers unable to take digital payments, global payment services experiencing widespread crashes, shipping hubs going nonoperational, packages delayed, entire businesses offline, false fire alarms being triggered, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs toppled as even McDonald’s and Starbucks are hamstrung, and computer users across the world being greeted with the dreaded blue screen of death message: An unsmiley face and the message, “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart.”
Was this finally the alien attack we’ve all anticipated (and given the recent news, secretly craved)? Did a foreign adversary find a way to hobble much of the world? It turns out the disaster was more of an own goal. A software security company that is too big to fail like this pushed a bad software update and all hell broke loose. The Verge: What is CrowdStrike, and what happened? “The cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike brought down thousands of systems after pushing a faulty update to Windows machines.” My first reaction to the news was to send gloating texts to all the lifelong friends I’d convinced over the years to switch to using Macs. My next move was to check my portfolio at my online brokerage because I hold a relatively large position in CrowdStrike. Sadly, that didn’t tell me much since the site’s news feed was down because of the outage. (On the plus side, this is the first good news in a while for Dems: The whole world is in a blue state.)
+ “The catastrophic failure underscores an increasingly dire threat to global supply chains: The IT systems of some of the world’s biggest and most critical industries have grown heavily dependent on a handful of relatively obscure software vendors.” The most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen? Here’s the latest from CNN and BBC.
+ The Atlantic (Gift Article): What the Microsoft Outage Reveals. “Why are we so bad at preventing these? Fundamentally, because our technological systems are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. These are not computer programs built by a single individual; they are the work of many hands over the span of many years. They are the interaction of countless components that might have been designed in a specific way for reasons that no one remembers. Many of our systems involve massive numbers of computers, any one of which might malfunction and bring down all the rest. And many have millions of lines of computer code that no one entirely grasps.” (Feel better?) It’s funny, my first thought when learning of the outage wasn’t millions of lines of code, it was this guy.
+ Microsoft on CrowdStrike outage: have you tried turning it off and on? (15 times).
+ “Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys” and delete it. Boot the host.” Here’s how IT admins are fixing the Windows Blue Screen of Death chaos.
+ Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts Friday due to the global tech outage. (In the end, the only things that will survive are cockroaches and fried dough.)
