This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Now, you may have forgotten, but about a month or two ago, we had a huge, complete meltdown of the computer systems of the world when CrowdStrike failed.

I did an episode on it, and while we've all just kind of forgotten about it. And today I'm joined by Chris Stokel Walker, who's an author, journalist,

lecturer, and starting new column at The Guardian as well, aren't you? Yeah, for a whole week, Ed,

not a whole month, I'm taking over tech space, which will be very exciting for the month of September.

But the reason I brought you on is you wrote a great article for the Independent back at the end of July about how CrowdStrike isn't the only cyber company that could trigger a global meltdown the second they fail.

And this is a subject that fascinates me because I love disaster movies and also this article was terrifying.

So why don't you walk me through it?

Yeah.

So basically back in July, we had that odd outage that people might remember, basically

people woke up in Asia, Australia and then the UK, and then encountered blue screens of

death on Microsoft Windows, which is something amazing that, you know, I'm 35 now, and I remember

that happening when I was a kid, and then it's never happened since.

Like, for all that, you know, people make fun of Microsoft.

Actually, their PCs is decent.

But then suddenly everything went to hell in the handbasket.

So it turns out that, you know, CrowdStrike, which is one of the big service providers for kind of antivirus, tools and software, had misconfigured, basically, the thing that protects protects us so that it actually harmed us,

which is just the ultimate in fantastic holidays.

And it turned out that it was actually within CrowdStrike, the thing that was bugged,

...