Thoughts and prayers with my IT colleagues worldwide who are dealing with a major sh*tshow today.
Cyber Security provider CrowdStrike pushed out an update that has ‘bricked’ tens of thousands of their customers machines taking many companies and organisations offline.
It is a pretty severe problem. Planes have been grounded; trains are delayed, Sky News is off-air, and GP surgeries in England are out of action. Locally, Belfast International Airport is affected. If you are travelling over the next few days make sure to keep up date with your carrier and airport and arrive 3 hours before your flight as some places have had to switch to manual processes and this is causing delays. The BBC is covering the story.
This is a major blunder for CrowdStrike. It is a golden rule of IT that you never put an update out on Friday. You also never push out important updates like this without first testing it extensively.
There will also be questions for Microsoft about how a third-party update was able to break Windows completely.
At a more prominent level, it shows how fragile we are in the modern world. This is cock up, but it could just as quickly have been a cyber attack from a rogue state or terrorist group.
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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