Last Week Today Episode 159 Show Notes for Monday, July 23rd, 2024

CrowdStrike Breaks the Internet, Fallout From the First Trump/Biden Debate, Climate Change & the Economic Folly of the Carbon Tax, Canada’s Summer Silly Season & the Future of AI.

To view the full program, please click on the image above.

CrowdStrike Breaks the Internet

Our top story tonight is the IT outage heard around the world. 

It’s being blamed on CrowdStrike, a large cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas which seems to have released a faulty security update for the Windows operating system last Thursday, July 18th, 2024.

The update, as outlined in the July 20th, 2024 Guardian post, “Slow recovery from IT outage begins as experts warn of future risks,” crashed airport, healthcare services and business IT functions in the “largest outage in history.”

As outlined in the July 21st, 2024 the Atlantic post, “The CrowdStrike Failure Was a Warning,” crucial systems across the world:

… collapsed on Friday, triggered by one mistake in a single company. The CrowdStrike outage hit banks, airlines, and health-care systems. It may end up being the worst information-technology disaster in history.

This was not, however, an unforeseeable freak accident, nor will it be …