Item — HN Reader

Was anyone else surprised how little disruption they personally experienced? I had braced for impact that weekend. But all my flights were perfectly on time, all my banking worked, providers worked, and sites & resources were available.

I don’t know if I somehow just have little exposure to Windows in my life or if there’s an untold resiliency story for the global internet in the face of such a massive outage.

All I can say is THANK YOU to all the unsung heroes who answered the call and worked their butts off. Infrastructure doesn’t work without you. We see you & we thank you!

7 comments

I was unaffected on my work laptop. One of my coworkers is a long-timer and said when the company first got laptops there was a huge "OMG leave your laptops on overnight" push to make sure updates were applied. I always at least sleep if not shut-down after work so I guess I missed out

I know at least one person who "survived" while her coworker's laptops were down.

My first question was "do you shut your machine off at the end of the day?" She did, and that's probably why about half of her office was affected, and the other half was not.

Can't update it if it isn't on.

IIRC only 5% of Windows machines were affected. So, it is very probable that most people just saw the news but have no real impact on them. Some had minor and maybe memorable impact, like Indian airlines giving handwritten boarding passes.

Crowdstrike took out less than 1% of the global Windows installation base.

But they took out a far larger fraction of installation base in regulated industries. The very industries who are tightly regulated because they are supposed to keep the wheels of the society turning.

Supply chain risks are everywhere, and in regulated industries they are highly concentrated.

I wish that were the case for me! My in-laws had their flight out of JFK delayed by 2-3 days, as did my daughter who was supposed to fly as an unaccompanied minor.

I was flying back to the US from Mexico on United the day after the meltdown. Reading the news, I was obviously quite concerned about how it was going to go (I was traveling with my 10 and 6 year old kids). Amazingly, everything went off without a hitch; not even the slightest delay.

I asked the guy at the luggage counter, and he said the day before was pretty crazy, but they had everything straightened out by the next day.

People found a really quick workaround. It would take a couple more days to fix if there wasn't any.

> all my banking worked

Vanguard.co.uk was down.

But yes, I echo your feelings. When you examine how complex everything is under the hood it's almost unbelievable that anything works.

I had a 7am flight on Delta from LGA to MSP. Seeing all of the blue screens in the airport was pretty surreal and our flight was delayed four hours.

But yeah, other than that, the only issue we ran into was that the Jimmy John’s we stopped at for lunch outside of MSP was slammed because Delta had ordered hundreds of sandwiches for their staff.

I’ve definitely experienced much worse travel disruptions due to normal weather (though obviously we got real lucky compared to some Delta customers).