The consequences of the CrowdStrike anti-virus bug were
interesting. Ususally Australia sleeps through these international
tech disasters, but it seems CrowdStrike rolled out their
self-sabotaging virus detection update during business hours here
yesterday. Nevertheless my business tasks processing and sending
orders were unaffected - post office, payment processing, banking,
e-commerce platforms, and of course my own Linux-hosted website,
worked without a hitch.
It wasn't until I _finished_ doing things using a computer that I
found out about the IT chaos that had apparantly begun while I was
working away. In the car to drive to the post office I turned on
the analogue FM radio tuned to ABC Classic (used to be Classic FM,
but apparantly my method of listening is old-hat), expecting the
weekday 4PM news bulletin to begin shortly. It didn't, without
explanation, but the announcer did, between rather glitchy playback
of classical music tracks, welcome listeners of "ABC RN", another
station broadcast by the state-owned media service. Their sudden
conversion to the pleasures of classical music in place of
under-funded talk radio shows being blamed on an IT outage
affecting the ABC as well as various other institutions that I
thankfully didn't need to associate myself with. "But here on ABC
Classic the music goes on..." she said, except a few times it
didn't, but that's not abnormal (My favouite was the time they
started a classical track playing then accidentally switched back
to the studio mic during a private chat discussing the programme
and then the broadcast went silent shortly after the announcer said
"shit" in conversation).
All fine at the post office, and for uploading parcel tracking
numbers back home. Early in the evening though my tired-looking CFA
pager, which I always wear to receive fire call-outs with the fire
brigade, went off to advise that "An IT interruption is currently
affecting many organisations across Australia, this includes some
of the CFA partners but CFA emergency call taking and dispatch
operations is not affected at this time. Updates will be provided
as the situation develops". I guess the situation didn't "develop"
since there were no more updates. Many members of the Country Fire
Authority now use, often really poorly designed, smartphone apps
that replace the CFA-issued pagers which are served by a dedicated
radio network. I guess many may have been concerned that those apps
could have failed due to the bug breaking their back-end servers,
so nobody would turn out to fires (not that many were likely on
that rainy day).
That night as usual I switched on the TV, broadcast TV of course
since I don't 'stream'. All was normal until I switched over for
the 7PM ABC TV news, seeing as I hadn't got my daily fix of
headlines about presidential politics in the USA (admittedly far
from disinteresting lately) from the radio earlier. Trump and Biden
had been banished from the first third of the news report, along
with the usual TV news studio, the entire country's state-based ABC
news programmes having been taken off-air by the software bug and
replaced by a "national edition" talking mainly about this IT
disaster (as usual somehow without really saying anything).
No weather report at all either, which was rather disappointing.
The weatherman who did the state and national weather reports
retired recently and they seem to have been taking emphasis off it
since, I suppose you're supposed to use the internet now.
Anyway after that it was back to normal for an evening's ad-free
screening of the CGI-heavy (realism somewhat lighter) movie Gravity
(2013), where the nation got to watch a hot but fluster-prone
astronaut experience her own frustrations with technology. With
more explosions though.
My take away from all this is how so much technology that's in
principle nothing to do with the internet, and in the case of
analogue radio not even computers, is still sensitive to these
issues. With a few computers down an organisation like the ABC
couldn't effectively work around the problem, even to record and
distribute a radio programme to be broadcast. This even with a
disruption so minor (the internet itself still worked fine) that I
could do my own routine online tasks completely unaware that there
was a problem. Inter-dependencies with computers have clearly
become impenetrable in practice these days.
