If you thought your Monday morning email glitch was bad, imagine a world where hospitals, airlines, and even your local 7-Eleven go completely haywire. Welcome to the biggest-ever IT outage, which has left the planet in digital chaos. From Tokyo to London, chaos reigned supreme as a problematic security update from CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity firm, crashed Microsoft’s Windows, leaving millions of computers begging for mercy. Buckle up babes. Here’s what we know about the global technology outage so far.
Picture this: you’re all set for your long-awaited vacation, and suddenly, your flight gets canceled. Well, this was the reality for thousands. Thousands of flights were grounded, and if you were lucky enough to stay put, your work-from-home day turned into a surprise holiday. All over the world, office workers couldn’t log in, surgeries were postponed, and even TV channels took an involuntary nap. Experts are calling it the largest IT outage in history even going so far as to compare it what they thought Y2K would bring — if it had actually happened. I mean, even Elon Musk went into full Twitter meltdown mode, calling it the “biggest IT fail ever” with an angry emoji. Spooky.
Everyone was affected — airports and big retailers, financial services, transportation, health services, and even media and sports.
So, what is CrowdStrike, the culprit behind this digital doomsday? CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity giant specializing in endpoint security software, which basically means they keep tabs on a zillion devices from PCs to payment terminals, looking out for bad vibes like cyber threats.
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CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz went into full damage control mode and clarified that this wasn’t a cyber attack but a glitch in their latest update for Windows hosts. They’ve already rolled out a fix, but the ripple effects are still shaking things up. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have so many industries relying on one company? Just a thought.
And of course, even though we’re in the middle of an IT apocalypse, once you get to Twitter no one can take anything seriously. So here are some of the funniest tweets on the global outage we’ve seen so far.
