As I sit here typing in San Francisco, things seem pretty normal. My laptop and Wi-Fi connection are working, and I’m chatting with colleagues via Slack. For the past 12 hours though, a huge swath of the planet was not so lucky.
The outage, which apparently stemmed from a faulty software update from security provider CrowdStrike, set off a chain reaction that took down PCs and servers at airlines, TV stations, banks, hospitals, and countless other organizations. As Ars Technica noted, “the problems started in Australia and followed the dateline from there.”
