We Stink!

You know I have to say something about Crowdstrike. How could I not? Recovery for most people seems to be well in hand, but there are still places dealing with it.

I was personally impacted because I was trying to fly home last Friday. While my airline and the airports I was flying through were not directly impacted, all the knock-on effects from the airlines and airports that were. Ended up getting home just a little bit late after lots of delays. Honestly, a normal travel day really.

Now, my coworker, Ryan Booz, was trapped. He couldn't fly out at all and ended up taking a train to a place to get a plane to another place and still had to rent a car (or something, I lost track) to make it home. I've read about people being trapped in the Atlanta airport for days. Literally days.

A bunch of friends had hundreds or even thousands of servers they had to deal with. Hospitals were down. 911 systems were offline. I'm not sure if we'll ever know how many, but this thing caused deaths. In short, a substantial chunk of planet Earth was negatively impacted.

Here's where I tell you how you could have avoided the troubles if only.... Yeah, I can't. This illustrates one thing.

We stink.

Collectively, we're just not very good at this whole IT thing. We call ourselves engineers and architects and other grandiose terms. Let's be honest. If architects built buildings the way we build systems, there'd be a lot more of them falling over & catching fire than there are. If engineers ran manufacturing plants the way we run IT shops, well, a lot more cars would be flinging parts into the air rather than rolling down the road.

What do we do?

We have to get better. This illustrates that the world is truly interconnected in ways that it never was in history. A single, small change, mildly messed up, took down a chunk of the planet. That's simply not acceptable. We have to focus on resilience. We must try, to truly, treat IT like it is architecture or engineering, because, actually, it is. We have to get better, because we can hurt everyone if we don't. Kind of a scary thought, but here we are.

Grant Fritchey

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

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