CrowdStrike: All Systems Down | Digital Dominos
2/4/202635 min
When CrowdStrike's faulty software update shuts down airports, hospitals and TV networks around the globe, they face intense backlash from the public. The world is forced to reckon with a terrifying new reality. As our systems become more interconnected, and reliant on just a handful of big tech companies, they also become more vulnerable to a single point of failure.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
[upbeat music] Wondering.
David Brown· Host0:05
[machine beeping] It's early morning on July nineteenth, twenty twenty-four in London. Inside a hospital room, a nurse preps an elderly man for a heart procedure. Before they begin, she wants to take one last look at his medical history, so she grabs the Microsoft Surface tablet off the mobile cart near his bed. But when she taps on the tablet screen, it turns solid blue and shows an error message. It looks like the dreaded blue screen of death, but she's never seen it on one of the hospital's tablets before. [exhaling] The nurse exhales, frustrated, and heads to the reception desk to see if she can find a functioning tablet. But when she reaches the hallway, she stops short. It's total chaos. A dozen nurses are hurrying back and forth, many of them carrying their own malfunctioning tablets. The nurse walks up to the reception desk to ask for help.
Speaker 01:03
Hey, could you pull up a patient's records for me? My tablet's just gone haywire.
Speaker 21:10
Everybody's been asking me the same thing, but my computer has the same blue screen as yours.
Speaker 01:15
Oh, did you call IT?
Speaker 21:18
I've been on hold with them for ten minutes. I think the whole network is down, and I just heard from a friend at another hospital, they're having the same exact problem.
Speaker 01:28
Oh, no! Do you think it's a cyberattack?