This will be good day or a bad day: The big tech outage of 2024. How are you affected?
Don’t you just hate it when you try to update some software only for your systems to go completely FUBAR? That’s what happened all over the world today when CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm, announced “Oops. Our bad.”
An update to their anti-hacking software is creating a headache for IT workers everywhere. Airports, TV stations, banks, hotels, Microsoft, and countless other companies and institutions.
The problem was first noticed at 3pm Friday local time in Australia. Suddenly, a lot of Blue Screens of Death started popping up on computers running Windows. This appears to show The Sphere in Las Vegas with its own BSOD.
Then it got worse. Sky News went offline. Delta, United, and American airlines issued a global ground stop. There were also problems at Pearson in Toronto. Hospitals have issues. Banks in South Africa and New Zealand are having trouble processing transactions. Various online retailers are pooched. My wife went to Starbucks this morning and our store couldn’t print out stickers for orders.
In other words, you may have issues at work today. Some will be tearing their hair out. Some will be disappointed that everything is working as usual. Others are all “Yay! Systems down! On a Friday! Nothing I can do.”
We’ll see how long this goes on. I imagine they already tried turning it off and on and jiggling the handle.
