reports of massive worldwide internet outage

[confusedaunt]

Just warning you - obviously if you are on here then it hasn't hit you hard! But I have just lost google, and my work internet connection

Might want to get your info right before you’re accused of attempting to scaremonger OP. Conspiracy theorists would have been crawling all over this with “they’re taking our access to money, medical care, family by forcing the internet offline!”

Probably. 911 is down in some places. What a thing to laugh at. Very professional of him.

Personally I wish the NHS app test results page was working, was expecting important ones today !

Yes! My husband works for Microsoft cloud and he says it’s crowdstrike which is a cyber security product that is widely used.

Ok on wifi at home or work but phone data was intermittent/non-existent this morning.

Same here. Where I am you can’t pay with cash in most places anyway. You can’t even go in the bank with cash and have them put it in your bank account. They don’t take cash.

MS stuff all working here, both cloud and desktop.

My point is that its amusing to techies who know what a complete shit show a lot of the industry is and how we are so dependent on it when we really shouldn't be.

There's a lot of talk about how AI will take over the world. His view is we are still under estimating the limitations of tech and how well its written and how vulnerable we are to situations like this.

Theres a huge number of programmers who write dreadful code and very few people who are actually really good out there. The stories he has would shock you in terms of how good some security is.

To him it is funny, because its an industry thing and he knows how much others will be running around like headless chickens - and he's glad he's not one of them for a change.

Its about time people woke up to the fragility of systems and gave more thought to it. This is going to become a bigger and bigger problem.

And tbh, I find it funny how many people are having a meltdown about it on MN. I guess come the Armeggedon we'll all be fine because MN is one of those things still up and running! At least we'll be able to whinge at other people on the internet for laughing manically.

We walk blindly into a cashless society at our peril!

ThNk goodness I filldd my car up yesterday and bought 32 toilet rolls a few days ago!

Ew. Firstly loads of people’s husband’s work in tech. Wowee. Loads of women even work in tech! DH works in tech but he has empathy so actually feels a bit sick at the thought of those people working to fix the problem! And everyone inconvenienced - hospitals perhaps, for example? Definitely not a laughing matter.

Obvs don't know the detail yet but, having worked in IT, I cannot fathom how someone fixing a bug can cause so much chaos: If it's true it's very worrying, any bug fix like this should be tested to within an inch of its life.

The amount of outages are getting very concerning imo. I would be interested to know what contingency services like supermarkets, hospitals etc have in place.

It's all very well saying keep cash (although I do agree with this) but if the items can't be scanned do supermarkets have manuals backup procedures in place?

I might be missing something, and hopefully someone with current IT knowledge will clarify, but I feel this is very worrying indeed.

Well looks like s/he's not the only one taking a break as a result. I wouldn't want to be them because I suspect their break will be long and enforced!

I go to events in rural areas where notspots are common. If I want to buy goods or food or beer I often need cash because card machines like SumUp don't work.

So I keep a stash of cash. Or a cache of cash.

@isthismylifenow

Cheques still exist in theory but very few places accept them and the books aren't routinely issued anymore. I've not had a cheque book in 15 years (uk).

The main times I've heard them being used are for payments to small organisations like club memberships through the post.

NHS app still down

Hope you get the results you want.

That's not good.

If the NHS system is down it means no operations, no clinics, no results and general mayhem.

not good at all.

If you're interested to know what's going on beyond the opinions of the husbands and sons of Mumsnet then here's a post about this in the tech nerds' equivalent of Mumsnet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195

Edit: and yes reports of 911 and ambulance services going down which is pretty alarming

@1apenny2apenny FWIW, in supermarkets it only seems to be affecting payments by card, either contactless or chip & pin. Even Waitrose which was only taking cash, had no issues scanning at all nor scanning and loading a gift card for me to buy.

What WILL be an issue if this continues for any length of time is that they've removed almost all manual (cash accepting) tills... the queue was building...

Thank you so much x

I still have a cheque book from about 10 or more years ago! Bloody useful.
They are slow, need to ''clear'', but if one isn't in a hurry are great.

Haha!

I’m not in the UK. Most computers are set to update automatically and they do this overnight - not during the middle of the day. But the thing is - the consequences of this update took effect in the middle of the day here - not overnight.

Which makes me think - why the hell would someone at Microsoft call an update “cyber strike” and why the hell that word would be embedded into that code and if the genuine MS code had errors in it then why didn’t the error hit at the time computers actually updated overnight? This would have meant computers wouldn’t have been able to start in the morning - not in the middle of the afternoon.

I’ve done software testing in a previous life and it is weird AF that a company as big as Microsoft would have a software glitch of this magnitude.

Banks use this software, fuel stations, airports, major grocery stores. I find it incredibly strange that no one tested this before it went out and even stranger that the code was named cyber strike.

Anyway, thank you for reading my TedTalk.

My local supermarket was only taking cash this morning. Fortunately I had a £10 note with me and wasn't buying much!

This is why we need to keep cash in some form!