Presently sponsored by: SentinelOne: Our agentless Offensive Security Engine automates red-teaming, without the false positives. This blog shows how.

Who would have thought that just a few hours after recording the previous week's video, the world would descend into what has undoubtedly become the largest IT outage we've ever seen:

I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 19, 2024

By virtue of the CrowdStrike incident occurring in friendly office hours for my corner of the world, I was able to get a thread on it going pretty early on. That tweet above has been seen 315k times at the time of writing and ended up being splashed across the global media. Unsurprisingly, I then spent the better part of the next three days doing endless interviews... and very little else. The question that constantly came up was "could this happen again?" to which the answer is obviously "yes". However, it was unprecedented despite the huge number of previous updates CloudStrike had sent out, not to mention all the times Windows itself has updated without a calamity anywhere near the scape of this one. But the mind does wander - "what if?" - and you think about just how bad this could be if things went wrong at just the right point 🤔

References

1. Sponsored by: Automox: Worklets are a big toolbox of small Bash and PowerShell scripts to automate and secure all your endpoints. Check them out!
2. We're coming back to the USA! (check the tweet, listen to the video and drop me a DM if you want to catch up)
3. Getting help from folks online is usually awesome... unless you're asking for mouse-related advice 😲 (although there was some good constant feedback around the Logitech MX Master 3S, so I ordered a couple of those)
4. Hey, you know what would help the CrowdStrike debacle? $10 Uber Eats vouchers! (the DM I got from the intentionally-anonymous-but-probably-crowdstrike person was particularly cringy)
5. For the 14th time, an MVP award dropped into my inbox (this award remains a career-defining achievement I'm enormously grateful to receive)