With all that is happening in the world, and not to make light of the potentially serious consequences of the CrowdStrike upgrade debacle, I am offering a bit of levity.
Like most weekday mornings, Friday, July 19, 2024, was busy and I had a doctor’s appointment added to my calendar. To avoid the inevitable backlog of delays with doctor’s visits, I request the first appointment of the day, which is often 7:30 a.m. Luckily, I was the first one on the schedule today to have a scan done on my knee. When I arrived, I was told there were some system delays. Upon starting up the computer that runs the scanning software, technicians were greeted with the blue screen of death. I was finally able to have the scan done, and when I was leaving, one of the nurses said that several surgeries had been canceled for the day.
During the drive to my appointment, I listened to NPR reporting on a global IT system outage. Immediately, I assumed it was another cyberattack. As we all know by now, there was a global IT outage attributed to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which issued a software update, causing machines running Microsoft Windows to crash.
On my way home from getting my knee scanned, I stopped at the supermarket to pick up dinner. I used my debit card at checkout, but it took what seemed like an eternity for the receipt to be dispensed. A store associate said they were working on the system because it had crashed earlier.
Getting back to work, I downloaded some images sent to me for an article, all dated December 31, 1979.
Future’s IT department, based in the UK, issued an email stating that our human capital management system is undergoing a “service disruption.” They didn’t say it was CrowdStrike, and I am not saying it was. I’ll assume my boss will approve my request for time off for knee surgery in October.
Not only am I not an expert in such things, but apart from being the IT director for the Davis family, I have no IT qualifications. However, I have interviewed many IT folks, and one of the common threads I hear from them is that when rolling out a global upgrade, make sure you test it on a small scale first.
