What's happened?
A Microsoft IT outage today has sparked global chaos. An update to a product from a vendor has caused computers running windows to crash.
As a result of this outage, so far at least three critical sectors could be affected significantly.
For the airline industry, technology outages can ground flights, affect air traffic control, disrupt ticketing and check-in processes. This can compromise passenger safety, lead to massive delays or financial losses.
In the medical industry, a technology outage can result in the loss of communication systems essential for patient care, critical patient data and access to electronic medical records. Delayed surgeries could follow, altered medication administration, and emergency responses lost or severely delayed, potentially endangering lives.
In the banking sector, this could lead to significant financial losses for people and institutions, possibly even undermine public trust in the financial system. Think about what we use each day, ATM/Cash machine withdrawals, online banking, online shopping and payment processing.
As Armando Cifuentes from our community highlighted, for the airline industry, technology outages can ground flights, disrupt ticketing and check-in processes - even affect air traffic control. This can lead to massive delays, financial losses, and compromise passenger safety and security.
Each of these scenarios highlights the catastrophic potential of technology failures across critical industries.
Our community cares
“You have a huge responsibility when your app is installed on a large number of systems and depends on other software apps” - Stefan Papusoi
"Y2K has arrived? 🫠 " - Rosie Sherry
"From what I have read, CrowdStrike automatically sent out a faulty channel file. This has caused PC’s running Windows (mainly Win 10 I think) to get stuck in a boot loop / BSoD (Blue screen of death).
There is a workaround to remove the faulty file (but if you have bitlocker you might not be able to get in via safe mode to do the workaround).
CrowdStrike have halted all updates until this is resolved, so if you haven’t been hit by it already, you should be ok…" - James Wadley
Armando Cifuentes shared another perspective from Twitter - going back to paper; “The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today”
“And many servers and ci systems run Linux, so windows bugs are only caught if tested on purpose... Although if you're making windows software, you'd think they would make the relocation effort.” - Ben Dowen
Join the discussion in the Community Club to see what everyone is talking about.
So what can testers do to help when this happens?
Prevention and preparation is always the key. We have some great topics to help you, and even more in Learn:
- Finding bugs before writing code – Sigge Birgisson
- Reason for defect misses and preventative measures - Venkat Ramesh Atigadda
- Identify Security Risks - Mary Gilmartin
- 6 Questions to ask before releasing software - Jake Bartlett
Remember folks, Software has bugs. This is normal. But they can mostly be prevented!
This is not a call to give up on software quality. This is a call to help people stay safe.
