On the other hand (maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate here): nobody died (I hope at least! It's possible if some hospital equipment, 911 calls, ... failed...) from this incident despite being such huge scale that almost everyone knows about it. It's almost as if humanity can be... fine... when all this computing equipment fails.
Many hospitals, including emergency rooms, were shutdown. Maybe no single death can be directly tied to the event but I'm pretty this effectively resulted in greater death.
Maybe some of those inconvenience had to time stop and contemplate the world but there are parts of the world where computers stopping don't leave people just fine.
Agreed and I’m sure there are tons of anecdotesb just in this community. My daughter for example is a night shift labor and delivery nurse at a level three metro hospital. They were heavily impacted. All of the phones were down, all of their internal messaging was down, translation services are down, it was a rough couple of nights.
I don’t have any direct experience with crowdstrike, but in my experience with security vendors in particular, they make it very difficult for customers to inject useful change management into the process. I’ve been in infosec for nearly thirty years and “my people” also need to shoulder some of the blame for catastrophizing delays in delivery of updates to preventative and detective controls. I’ve always known this but spending the last year ‘outside’ in central platform delivery and operations for a large financial has really brought that to light. Fortunately I know how to speak security so it helps us navigate but many aren’t so fortunate.
It also probably caused a lot of people to not be able to say goodbye to their loved ones, or miss their holiday, or whatnot. People don't travel exclusively for frivolous reasons.
I am not suggesting that airlines should see their operations as non-critical (and let a third party make arbitrary untested updates to their critical systems).
But maybe some organizations using air travel can learn from this. I am still hoping that the pandemic will have had some lasting positive effects (on top of all the pain it has caused).
