Global IT Crisis - or Media Frenzy?

Jennifer Stewart · 2 years ago · 161 views

  Global IT crisis! Media goes crazy. Catastrophe! Chaos! Thousands of flights grounded! Hospitals disabled, GP surgeries disconnected – people will die! Disease will spread. World could conceivably grind to a halt. It could take months to fix, small businesses could go under. Stock markets will plummet. Economies will crash. The blue screen of death! Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. The media licks its chops: clickbait galore. I fall for it for a while. Then Microsoft identifies the problem – a faulty driver deployed by a Crowdstrike Falcon cybersecurity tool used to protect computers from cyberattacks. All you have to do is reboot your computer in safe mode. But, shouts the media, that’s still a global catastrophe, because small businesses may not know how to do it. Big businesses will be fine but small businesses won’t be able to get hold of experts even on the phone – they’ll be too busy. inequality could skyrocket! Mass unemployment looms. 24 hours later It's nearly sorted out. Oh. Microsoft says you may need to reboot your computer 15 times. Chaos and catastrophe downgraded to inconvenience, predicted to last for days, not months. Media hunts around: what can we create anxiety about now? Hah! What if it happens again and this time it really does destroy the world. Or we could go back to hounding Joe Biden.