As the world suffers a global IT apocalypse, what's more worrying is how easy it is for this to happen

[Windows Central]

Friday, July 19, 2024, will forever be remembered as a day global IT outages crippled industry and healthcare services. But what's most terrifying is how easy it is for this to happen at all.

As the world suffers a global IT apocalypse, what's more worrying is how easy it is for this to happen : Read more

 

[Kaymd]

This is a fundamental weakness with our love of massive scale in all things in the modern world. It inevitably concentrates resources to a few centers, be it in manufacturing, software, tools, research etc.

The upside is this concentration allows unprecedented investment of funds into endeavors that is impossible for a smaller scale. The downside of course is that it's super-fragile, since everything is based on a few unique templates. Similar to the way a virus can easily wipe out an entire population since the biological makeup of the species is based on some unique root components (think Covid for example).

Not sure there's an easy alternative in general, but in this case at least, the blame lies with irresponsible deployment of software without adequate testing.

 

[naddy69]

Lighten up, Francis. The world is not coming to an end. Stuff Happens. It will be fixed.

People were in an absolute tizzy over Y2K too. It was way overblown and absurd. Nothing happened.

What this mess really points out - AGAIN - is that critical functions should not be depending on Windows. We have Unix for that. Windows should only be for frontend reporting and such. The heavy lifting on the backend should be reserved for the heavy-duty software.

 

[nop]

Even Unix has PEBKAC errors (problem exists between keyboard and chair)

but yea

https://twitter.com/x/status/1814207876195364911