Thomas Germain
In a world where a single point of failure can throw our machines into chaos, everything from sharks to authoritarian governments to old ladies have brought the web to its knees.
On Friday 19 July, 2024, the world woke up to what many have called the worst digital crisis of all time. A botched software update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike crashed some 8.5 million computers, smearing Microsoft's dreaded "blue screen of death" across the globe. Airlines cancelled over 46,000 flights in a single day, according to the FlightAware. Hospitals called off surgeries. 911 emergency services faced disruptions in the US. Film Forum, an arthouse cinema in New York, switched to cash payments as its credit card system went down. Microsoft and CrowdStrike issued a solution, but the outages continue almost a week later. It's a reminder, frustrated IT experts said, to never push updates out on a Friday.
As our infrastructure becomes ever more tangled with the internet, this won't be the last catastrophic online outage. But CrowdStrike wasn't the first, either. The history of computing is littered with examples of our digital fragility, and crashes of the past offer a glimpse of what it will feel like on the day the internet turns off.
"There's a price to pay for the convenience we enjoy," says Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity and technology analyst. "It will happen again, and from a technical standpoint, the fix for CrowdStrike was relatively easy. Next time, we might not be so lucky."
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