Special report: Major computer outages occur worldwide

This is what happens when critical software isn't treated as critical software.

They send a reporter to the Spirit Airlines desk where “emotions are spilling over.” Emotions are always spilling over at Spirit so everything is normal.

This is what people thought would happen back in 1999 when the year 2000 would start 💀

This is what happens when software updates are pushed and installed without user review and consent. IT departments used to actually work on these kinds of updates to decide whether they were needed/wanted and safe to deploy. They would sandbox a test case to make sure it was solid before deploying systemwide. This is a direct result of ceding that power and responsibility to the software providers. How many times has a windows update messed up your machine?

As someone who works in tech, being the guy whose single bad code commit caused a worldwide outage costing billions is my recurring nightmare.

With cybersecurity like this, who needs criminals?

As an IT professional that spent his career in high end enterprise computing: all I am hearing is word salad trying to suggest industry incompetence excuses the situation. In the late 1970's three basic principles of big systems design were: 1. Design to be as secure as possible. 2. Design to have no single points of failure. and 3. Design into the system redundancy which can cope with the work if there is a failure. The last 24 hours have demonstrated several single points of failure and the disaster recover plan which is essentially a well spun PR campaign telling the public "its very complicated, its not our fault, we have the world's best people working on it". Gone are the days when competent people designed and ran the big critical systems. The most important qualification criteria in the industry nowadays is low cost and arrogance. The brains of the industry are engaged in massively profitable software where they might get a share of the IPO and the left overs run the worlds critical systems. The only real positive I can take from this outage is we will have a period free from news on which of the incompetents running for high government office are leading the herd ...

This is why you test an update before you friggin deploy it world wide.

The irony of cybersecurity software bringing down machines is not lost on me

Have you tried unplugging it, then plugging it back in?

The irony of a cyber security firm being the root of the problem is hilarious to me.

A few years ago I was taking a business class and one of the lessons was never letting all your business infrastructure rely on one software or hardware. You need redundancy. You need backup systems. This is a perfect example of this.

Who needs a hack when you have an update.

When a single companys security software is so widespread, it IS the security threat that can be exploited against the public. That should not be allowed to happen.

This just proves how insanely vulnerable we are to computer technology. Insane.

Don't ever make one piece of software become the critical infrastructure for everything

so this time when windows updated, the whole world froze at "updates are 99% complete"

This is exactly why we shouldn't monopolize everything.

LOL We used CrowdStrike when I used to work in a SOC. I got fired for arguing a ton with management about the tools they choose being bad. Talk about feeling justified.

Traffic lights and major things in the government shouldn’t even be connected to the internet we never used to need it