It must be hard to be a Chinese or Russian strategist these days. I imagine their superiors in the military and government are tired of always hearing the same advice. “Just wait, don’t do anything, Clown World will destroy itself. It’s inevitable.”
The ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’ sparked global chaos today – with planes and trains grounded, the NHS disrupted, shops closed, football teams unable to sell tickets and banks and TV channels knocked offline.
The devastating technical fault caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British airports since Covid.
NHS England said patients should not to attend GP appointments unless informed otherwise due to problems with the system used to schedule appointments, while train passengers have been told to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’. In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Delhi staff set up a makeshift whiteboard to record departures.
Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
Cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error that hit Microsoft 365 apps and operating systems and said a ‘fix has been deployed’. The American firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’.
