Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart

A glitch¹² in an update to the CrowdStrike cybersecurity software suite took down computer systems around the world last night and into today, including some critical Cloud infrastructure services, notably a few Azure data centers, which in turn took down systems that didn't actually use CrowdStrike or even Azure but relied on systems and services that do. Everything went sideways, and it was downed upstreams up the wazoo all the way down.

If you're wondering how something like this could happen, the answer is that Big Tech and many other giant enterprise companies have been boasting record profits year over year, but it's never enough for The Shareholders, so the only way to deal with such corporate good fortune was to spend the last two or three years laying off (or pushing out) their most skilled employees in favor of running evermore LEAN and outsourcing work to giant overseas contracting agencies with significantly lower standards, and then cutting any remaining opex spends³ wherever two pennies were rubbing together. The question everyone should be asking is, "Why doesn't something like this happen every few days?"

On the bright side, the outage appears to have disabled the space lasers they're using to melt us with the global warming blasters, so the weather is lovely today. I have all my windows open as I head into the weekend with four strong beers and two brand-new CDs to listen to as I procrastinate from cleaning the kitchen every day for the rest of my life.