Sad point number one … “the worst in world history” could really be referring to a lot of things these days.

Alas, today I write about the worst IT failure in world history.

I can’t explain all the nitty gritty that went into the Crowdstrike distribution that shut the world down, but I heard a great explanation on Power Lunch, view it here 👆🏼.

As a communications professional, typically I would dive in to how the company has responded, how partners are impacted, how customers, and investors, are being reassured product and innovation live on.

Record scratch … this enormous global outage could have been SO much worse. My guttural reaction is not about corporate communications but about how technology-dependent we are, and how a massive company error, to say the least, happened on a Friday in July. Global financial markets should be breathing an enormous sigh of relief. I’m betting had this happened the Monday before election day in November, we would be addressing a much different, panicked story.

Today, July 19, the Dow Jones closed down 1%, as did the NASDAQ. I have been disaster drilling in my mind the last few hours; if Crowstrike didn’t identify, and take credit for, the outage immediately, if Microsoft hadn’t gone down, how long before the problem would have been uncovered, how many IT teams are cleaning up someone else’s mess this weekend, the list goes on.

Wouldn’t a post mortem on this, from a communications perspective, be fascinating? Maybe I will use that idea for a thesis one day!