I happened to be at a hospital Friday morning and talked to the nurses about the effects of the CrowdStrike outage on them. Some time after midnight computers crashed. They had contingency plans to use paper records and started laboriously writing reports. Within in an hour or two, IT had restored a few computers and by sun up, everything was working. This is secondhand information and may not be entirely accurate, but I think it’s a fair statement that event was an annoyance, but not a catastrophe.
That seems to be what happened all over.
During the runup to Y2K twenty-five years ago, I was on the frontlines, testing and patching systems. On December 31, 1999, the company I was working for, Computer Associates, offered emergency technical help to all of its customers. HR and facilities brought in catered sandwiches and pizza and it was almost a party. We had a closed circuit TV connection to the company Y2K Emergency Center in New York and the team was poised to jump in when needed.
Some outfit in Australia had a minor problem early in the day that was quickly fixed. The PR department snapped staged photos of code geniuses clustered around terminals. That was about all the excitement.
Our dev team swarmed the catering tables and did their own work all day and into the night, not wanting to forgo promised bonus pay. After six, HR quit shooing away the sales people from the food. Our Y2K event was longer than most corporate parties, but completely as dull.
In other words, the day was a total “meh.”
I wrote a Substack post on CrowdStrike Friday explaining why I was not surprised that the crashes didn’t last for long, although I also think steps could be taken to prevent similar events in the future.