Global IT crisis! Media goes crazy.
Catastrophe! Chaos! Thousands of flights grounded! Hospitals disabled, GP surgeries
disconnected – people will die! Disease will spread. World could conceivably grind to a halt. It could
take months to fix, small businesses could go under. Stock markets will
plummet. Economies will crash. The blue screen of death!
Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. The media licks
its chops: clickbait galore. I fall for it for a while. Then Microsoft
identifies the problem – a faulty driver deployed by a Crowdstrike Falcon
cybersecurity tool used to protect computers from cyberattacks.
All you have to do is reboot your computer
in safe mode. But, shouts the media, that’s still a global catastrophe, because
small businesses may not know how to do it. Big businesses will be fine but small
businesses won’t be able to get hold of experts even on the phone – they’ll be
too busy. inequality could skyrocket! Mass unemployment looms.
24 hours later
It's nearly sorted out. Oh. Microsoft says
you may need to reboot your computer 15 times. Chaos and catastrophe downgraded
to inconvenience, predicted to last for days, not months. Media hunts around:
what can we create anxiety about now?
Hah! What if it happens again and this time it really does destroy the world. Or we could go back to hounding Joe
Biden.
