One bit of good news about the “epic IT crash” that brought the western world to a temporary standstill is that it was a product of human error rather than a Russian cyber-attack like the SolarWinds hack of 2020 that had a similar modus operandi.

Last week’s outage was caused by an update that a big US cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, pushed to its corporate clients early on Friday morning, which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices inoperable – with predictable consequences, given that virtually every large organisation in the world is using Microsoft Windows.

Fortunately, fixing the problem turned out to be straightforward, though tedious, which will doubtless lead people to think of it as a hiccup rather than as a dry-run for something........

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