The CrowdStrike weekend and what it taught you about trust

On Friday 19 July 2024, somewhere between 04:09 and 05:27 UTC, an average sysadmin in Frankfurt noticed his workstation was showing a blue screen of death. He rebooted. It came back. He rebooted again. It came back again. He stood up to get coffee and realised, walking down the corridor, that all the screens in all the rooms were showing the same thing. A blue rectangle. A Windows error message. A melodic longing for a restart that nobody could fulfil.