Grounded Flights. Mobile Ordering on the Fritz. Welcome to Y2K Lite.
Reading Time: 3 minutesToday’s meltdown feels kind of weirdly familiar., Tech meltdown: The glitch feels like Y2K lite.
The tiniest of problems occurred shortly after I woke up: When I opened up the Starbucks app, a pop-up informed me that mobile ordering was down. Then another: A sign at my subway stop said that ‘train arrival information is inaccurate,’ referring to those screens that show that the next N is 2 minutes, or whatever, away. One co-worker lamented that he could not sign into Pokémon Go; another reported troubles with her banking app. In contrast, when I went to buy my lunch at Sweetgreen, I experienced the shortest wait time of my life, possibly because of less mobile-order congestion. The world is, as I write, in the aftermath of a ‘widespread tech meltdown.’
911 lines were down. Surgeries were delayed. Where people once relied on screens, they now turned to whiteboards. Flights were canceled.
‘We’ve been hearing all about the messes at the airports,’ Today Show host Hoda Kotb said in a morning broadcast. The mess had come for NBC, too, she revealed. ‘We had those blue screens everywhere.’
On the air, George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, explained to Kotb that the issue had been resolved but things were still recovering. The firm’s software is in global use. ‘The system was sent an update,’ said Kurtz on the Today Show, ‘and that update had a software bug in it.’
A little bug interrupted everything from lifesaving help to cups of coffee, shifting the fabric of the world around us. I don’t think it’s too dramatic to put it like that. It felt reminiscent of a time that many of us had been warned about—the first moments of the new millennium. ‘It is as though the Y2K apocalypse has finally arrived, 24 and a half years later than expected,’ Matteo Wong at the Atlantic wrote, noting that today’s issue ‘was likely the largest IT failure in history.’
For the zoomers: Before Y2K referred to a renewed interest in trucker hats and low-rise jeans, it was what we called the supposedly impending meltdown of software systems around the world. (The abbreviation was first typed out in 1995 in ‘an Internet discussion group of computer geeks exploring the millennium bug long before most people were surfing the World Wide Web,’ MediaDownloader reported at the time.) The computers were on course to interpret ’00’ as ‘1900.’ Wired dubbed 1998 ‘The Year We Noticed Y2K,’ observing that ‘every technology reporter seemed to be handing in the same assignment: a Y2K survivalist story, complete with lurid descriptions of 500-gallon propane tanks and gleaming Bushmaster AR-15 battle rifles.’ (The magazine noted that there was the issue of the bug itself, and then the twin issue of the panic.) In just the U.S., some $100 billion (in 1999 dollars!) was spent to fix things. In hindsight, it’s all too easy for it to seem kind of ridiculous.
It appears today that—just as in 2000—the world did not end. CrowdStrike’s CEO told Kotb that, for many customers of the company’s software, good old rebooting would do the trick. It feels, on the ground, like Y2K lite. But it is hard to know what the full ramifications of today will be, given that they involved medical and travel services. Surely there are a lot of people who are having very complex days, at best. The New York Times, keeping track of the ongoing consequences in a live blog, calls today ‘a stunning example of the global economy’s fragile dependence on certain software, and the cascading effect it can have when things go wrong.’
What will it feel like if and when things really do collapse? Will stockpiled food come in handy, or will it be a series of issues that are merely annoying, and then suddenly, for some people, life-threatening? ‘This is an incredibly powerful illustration of our global digital vulnerabilities and the fragility of core internet infrastructure,’ Ciaran Martin, the former head of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center, told Wired on Friday morning. Perhaps it’s also a warning.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/07/tech-meltdown-glitch-crowdstrike-y2k.html
Ref: slate
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