Just after midnight Eastern Time on July 19, 2024, the enterprise cybersecurity company CrowdStrike YOLOed a software update to millions of Windows machines. Or as they put it:
On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems.
Overnight, about 8.5 million computers blue screened, affecting hospitals, banks, 911 systems–as the New York Times put it, “It is more apt to ask what was not affected.” The answer is Linux, Macs, and phones.
The outage highlighted a different kind of digital divide. On one side, gmail, Facebook, and Twitter kept running, letting us post photos of blue screens located on the other side: The Windows machines responsible for actually doing things in the world like making appointments, opening accounts, and dispatching police.
Airline cancellations is a good metric, but I want to look directly at air traffic: How many planes were in the air? How many planes should have been in the air?