Ronan Murphy woke up early on July 19. The chairman of Get Visibility had three online meetings scheduled with companies in Australia and New Zealand, so he was up at 5am. When he logged into his email, he found all his calls had been cancelled. “That’s weird,” he thought.
After a brief conversation with staff in Singapore who had heard about the so-called “blue screen of death” at a supermarket in the city, Murphy was shocked to find that Sky News and the BBC had gone offline, and for a moment he thought the world was coming to an end.
In fact, it was a CrowdStrike technology outage that caused chaos around the world this month when an update to the company’s antivirus software crashed Microsoft Windows programs around the world.