Look at the picture below of the doors to the Speedway on July 19, 2024, in Lore City, Ohio (I-70, exit 186) and you'll see four "CASH ONLY" signs taped to the glass. Not pictured is a sign that the ATM was down, so there was no way to get CASH. Fortunately, Gourmet Chef Elaine and I carry CASH regularly, so filling up the tank wasn't an issue. However, for other travelers, this likely caused some panic.
This outage was the result of a bad Crowdstrike (a cyber-security firm) update that caused millions of BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) crashes on Microsoft Windows computers. While the final details are not known, there are two major reasons this caused such a widespread outage. First, Crowdstrike rolled out this update way too fast. While it's imperative to get important security updates distributed rapidly, you must start small. I like the "order of ten" approach. Roll it out to 10 systems first. If no problems are reported in an hour, bump it up to 100 systems. Then 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, etc. Six hours after you started, you're up to 10 million systems and eliminated the risk that this type of catastrophic failure could happen.
The other major reason this update could cause such an impact is the design of Microsoft Windows. The code that Crowdstrike uses runs as a kernel process (i.e. has complete control) and if it crashes, Windows crashes. Other major operating systems, like MacOS and Linux, don't allow that, offering safer ways to do the same thing. I could go on about why Microsoft chose their design, but they've been making the same mistake all the way back to PC DOS. As they say, a leopard cannot change its spots.
But the moral of the story is ... CARRY CASH! (at least a little).
