Annie Tsai

Seems like every week by Friday it feels obvious what the biggest news of the week will be, and then just as reliably as the sun sets once a day, there is something equally as interesting, culture changing, and newsworthy the very next day. 

As a writer, it makes it hard to narrow in on one singular story to tell week after week. As a human, it’s incredibly challenging to keep up with the constant whiplash and challenge of focus. It’s too much. What we “older” adults are feeling right now – the discomfort and ongoing feeling of being just a little tired from all the stuff that’s happening around us but in our faces all the time – that’s been there for our kids’ entire lives. 

(For clarity, I say “older” because I am a part of the last generation that experienced being a teenager without the internet.) 

Here’s the thing – everything that we are experiencing right now, it’s all happened before. Maybe it took place in our parents’ or grandparents’ time, maybe a few generations before that. Definitely not with the internet and social media and bots and AI, but the impact to decision-making and outcomes – yes. 

The campaign-defining “Daisy” commercial from the 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson v. Barry Goldwater presidential election, for example, reached into homes with their newly minted televisions and incited people in an entirely new and triggering way that represented the turning point for that election.

Spoken over an image of a nuclear bomb going off from the inside of a beautiful little blond girl’s eye, an ominous voice says “these are the stakes to make a world in which all of God’s children can live hard to go into the dark we must either love each other or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

Sound familiar? 

So when on Thursday afternoon as my team and I were heading home from a business trip in Denver, we didn’t know it then, but a few massive bugs were just about to be released from both Microsoft and CrowdStrike that would take down airlines, banks, and about 1% of Windows machines around the world (and the Starbucks app, apparently). 

We experienced delay after delay after delay and finally around 3 am, our final team member made it home to Rochester, NY. What we were experiencing was a Microsoft Azure outage that started at 2:56 pm pacific time and “had widespread consequences, including the grounding of hundreds of flights from major aviation firms like American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines” as reported by TechRadar.

And then just hours later at around 10 pm pacific, CrowdStrike said “hold my beer” and had an IT outage so big that it showed us the promise that Y2K never delivered. 

Let’s put on the backburner that Microsoft got a hall pass for its outage because CrowdStrike’s was so incredibly spectacular. As Mike Martin, Lead IT Site Administrator at STERIS, recounted, “I started seeing the pattern and every IT manager including Directors and CIO has been up since then.” 

A few days later, Microsoft released a USB drive solution that would let IT teams recover machines faster. Yes, a USB drive. But hey, let’s put aside that humans had to (and have to) manually reboot each machine in order to get it to work after a third party software with kernel access took down Fortune 100 infrastructure. And let’s put aside that a mere 1% of Windows servers having the “blue screen of death” can take consumer life to such a devastating halt. 

Have you ever seen a hand-written boarding pass? 

Let’s instead talk about how the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, was the Chief Technology Officer at McAfee on April 21, 2010 when they had a similarly spectacular and preventable IT outage. Hospitals, schools, police departments, and major corporations also had significant downtime due to a release bug that forced Windows machines into a continuous reboot cycle. 

Sound familiar? 

Back to elections. Coincidentally, there has been one other time where an incumbent U.S. President has stepped down as the Democratic candidate, and that was Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson stepped down and supported his Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 campaign for President of the United States due to the Vietnam War’s increasing unpopularity. Humphrey won the Democratic nomination but lost to Richard Nixon in the general election. And we all know what happened next.

Does the story already told tell the story that is yet to come? Only time will tell.