What Y2K Can Teach Us About the CrowdStrike Outage

We were warned that our embrace of computer technology would lead to disaster.

By integrating computers into more and more areas of our lives, we were told, we had created a scenario in which an everyday malfunction could bring everything crashing down. Air travel would grind to a halt, bank accounts would become inaccessible, essential services would be severely disrupted, and people would stare in horror as the computers they depended on simply stopped working.

These warnings were not in reference to CrowdStrike's IT outages last week, but to the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer outage, when experts warned that disaster ...