When the Internet Almost Went Dark
Reading and thinking about the Crowdstrike / Microsoft outage reminded me of an article I wrote last year. As I write this Delta Airlines still isn’t fully back up and people are stranded in airports all over the country.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Picture this: you wake up one day, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and sit down at your computer, ready to start your day. But as soon as you try to load up your favorite website, you’re met with an error message. You try a few more sites, but nothing seems to be working. Suddenly, it hits you - the internet is down.
At first, it might not seem like a big deal. You’ll just have to find something else to do with your time for a little while, right? Wrong. It’s a massive, extended internet outage, which will result in severe implications for our society.
First of all, communication would be severely impacted. You wouldn’t be able to send emails, use social media, or even video chat with your loved ones. Imagine having to resort to snail mail or - gasp! - actually talking on the phone to keep in touch with people. Oops! Who even has a fucking landline phone these days.
With so many companies relying on the internet to conduct their operations, a prolonged outage could cause chaos and confusion. Online retailers, banks, and stock markets would all take a major hit. Can you even imagine the chaos that would ensue if people couldn’t access their online bank accounts?
And let’s not forget about entertainment. The internet has revolutionized the way we entertain ourselves. Streaming videos and music online, playing games, and browsing social media have all become staples of our daily lives. Without the internet, we’d have to resort to other forms of entertainment - maybe even (gasp!) reading a book or going outside.
Access to information would also be severely limited. The internet has made it easy to access vast amounts of information with just a few clicks. But without it, we’d have to rely on old-fashioned methods like books, newspapers, and TV news (cable only streamers are shit out of luck).
A long-term internet outage would be no joke. It would completely upend our way of life and force us to adapt to a world without constant connectivity.
A faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed many computers running Microsoft Windows. This event highlights the brittleness of global technology infrastructure. When a single flawed piece of software is released, it can instantly cripple countless companies and organizations. This incident exposes the fragility of our interconnected systems – a single bug can bring everyday business to a halt across the globe.