Planes grounded, trains delayed, television stations off air, hospital appointments cancelled, electronic payments halted. No, it wasn’t the start of a massive cyber-attack from Russia, or the backdrop to a Hollywood blockbuster, but an IT upgrade that unexpectedly went disastrously wrong.
That it had such widespread effects is to some extent testament to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s Windows’ operating system, a well-known global dependency, and more particularly to a faulty software update pushed out by the security and anti-virus company CrowdStrike to its widely used Falcon software system.
