Older Daughter was summoned for jury duty this morning. She dressed nicely and drove to our very small rural county seat to report for duty. What she thought was going to be a very long day of civic responsibilities turned into a very short jaunt. She was home within a couple hours.
Why? Because the global cyber security outage that happened early Friday morning even impacted the local court system, which was unable to access its own information as a result.
This is, needless to say, a massive vulnerability in an inter-connected system of anything. It's not that cybersecurity isn't necessary; but by having one access point – apparently globally – then it's vulnerable to massive disruptions. Even a very small rural county seat is affected.
Everyone is reporting the "blue screens of death."
As of this writing, the IT outage has affected banking, transportation and logistics, medical systems, news organizations, sporting events, manufacturing, supply chains, package deliveries (i.e. FedEx, UPS, Amazon), government services, retail and e-commerce, education, and much more. As one source noted, the worldwide IT outage seemed a little "like Y2K, except it actually happened this time."
Time to check in, dear readers. Who has been impacted, and how?
Our local Tractor Supply was doing hand written receipts and could not run credit cards about noon. This is in a small rural county town in North Texas.
ReplyDeleteDidn’t even notice. Just mucking out stalls and working on a puzzle! Don’t need no stinkin’ IT.
ReplyDeleteOur son and daughter-in-law were stuck at the airport last night, their flight home delayed by 6 hours.
ReplyDeleteUgh. We've been having severe thunderstorms here so I didn't venture into town. Hope everything is fixed now!
ReplyDeleteIn south-central Idaho; UPS and Fedex were delivering on normal schedules, our UPS guy said no issues at all with them. WinCo and Walmart had no issues.
ReplyDeleteOur work is based on non-Windows products, so no discernable impact here.
ReplyDeleteHere in Alabama, I felt nothing. Internet worked just fine. I needed to buy something on Amazon, but did not go there. I was not on a plane and did not need a bank or to use a cc. However, it was raining, so I would have been out using cc otherwise. I am surprised I was not affected at all , at least as far as I know.
ReplyDeleteI work for a large company that uses many Microsoft products and does lots of computer and technology work for its customers. Among some parts of the company it was pretty chaotic today. I imagine the weekend won't be much fun for some folks. I'm a professional computer guy, but I'm amazed at the stuff people will trust computers to do for them, even in the have of all the evidence that they're a disaster waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I are retired and living just north of Oklahoma City. The glitch didn't affect us at all. I am, however, in total agreement with Anonymous above who "uses many Microsoft products." If this event does not serve as a clarion call to America of the IT vulnerabilities to which we have exposed ourselves, then God help us when deliberate attacks do come. It will be our own fault that we did not repair the "breach in the wall" that has so clearly been pointed out to us.
ReplyDeleteJust wait until they force all banking to be digital and then see what happens. All by design.
ReplyDeleteI highly recommend reading, "The Killswitch Chronicles" the Complete Anthology by G.R. Carter. It's an ebook, unfortunately, published in 2018, and it is eerie how many things are happening now that he includes in his book. It's actually a series that he compiled, and I've reread it more than once. It's not high literature, but logical and goes for years, in America. I downloaded it from Amazon in 2018, and wish I knew a way to print it. Nonetheless, read it; it is turning out to be quite predictive.
ReplyDeletesame ol', same ol' at my place of employment. Most of the systems are linux-based, but the ms-based systems were giving the IT guys some headaches.
ReplyDelete~hobo
At my old employer, all the money was made on Unix/Linux systems, but the IT department only supported Windows.
ReplyDeleteSo, we offshore guys were responsible for our own systems...
If it was day 1 after being summoned, she needs to take things with her to do while she's trapped in her seat. As long as she can hear and can raise her hand while they actually start the selection process it's extremely monotonous. If she raises her hand to something they don't like she'll be headed home anyway from not making the 1st cut. That's what happens here. Now the further you make it through the selection process, the more involved it is.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I had to run out very early to town. Two stops, one used a cc for, and no problems. Alabama.
By the way, I want my landline back dad-gummit. Cell phones are fine in town, but service stinks out of town, on the roads and at home. Having cordless home phones was much easier. Never fear. I'm told fiber optixs is going to be so much better! But that us country folks may have to wait a while. So communication is screwed.
Jacksonville airport was all messed up, a large hospital system couldn't use their computer systems for several hours, and a county to the south couldn't use their 911 system. Our county seemed to function as per usual.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't able to have my chemo treatment because of the computer IT problem. It was nice to have a longer time between treatments but only so long as the cancer didn't gain ground.
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