The CrowdStrike Disaster

“The CrowdStrike Disaster”
by William McGonagall

In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-four
CrowdStrike pushed many content updates out the door
But regarding July the Nineteenth, I am sorry to say
That an error was made upon that fateful day

Across the world were soon spied sorry scenes
Of shining blue Windows computer screens
With a frowny face made up of ASCII art
Saying “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart”

Millions quickly attempted to troubleshoot
By pressing a button to make their computers reboot
But their desperate attempts were all in vain
As the computer screens quickly went blue again

Airports worldwide quickly ground to a halt
Airlines saying this time it really wasn’t their fault
Hospitals remained steadfastly HIPAA compliant
Unable to use the computers on which they were reliant

Admins using Linux were unaffected by the terrible bug
So they sat with Macintosh users looking intolerably smug
CrowdStrike and Microsoft engineers earned their pay
As they faced a tumultuous and most terrible day

CrowdStrike insisted their customers were still fully protected
But unable to use their PCs, they were left feeling rather dejected
Though some said their computers had been returned to their primes
By being rebooted as many as fifteen times

By the end of the day a fix had been deployed
But IT workers worldwide were left exceedingly annoyed
That they would need to repair crashed computers in person
If they did not want the situation to continue to worsen

As the weekend drew near and work was adjourned
Experts asked themselves what lessons would be learned
Of one thing they were all abundantly clear
The same thing would happen again some time the following year