The CrowdStrike crash was an act of God

CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the sense of a bolt from the blue, is exactly what the company produced: millions and millions of Windows PCs simultaneously succumbed to the Blue Screen of Death, as a company whose whole raison d’etre is averting internet catastrophe caused one. The biggest, supposedly, in history. 

Is it in bad taste to say that the great internet outage of July 2024 was, in some respects, just a little bit funny? Plainly, it wasn’t funny if you were trying to book a GP appointment, or trying to pass through an international airport, or had a lot of money in, say, CrowdStrike shares. But there was undeniably a sort of festival atmosphere amid all the chaos. For tech-support workers, of course, it was a complete nightmare; but for everyone else it was a bit like a snow day at school.