A major tech outage that hit companies and organizations around the globe on July 20, 2024. The outage was caused by a glitch in a software update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The update was intended to be a routine one, but it caused computers to malfunction and shut down. This led to widespread disruptions, including banks and hospitals being taken offline, flights being grounded, and 911 services being unavailable. The outage began in Australia at 3:30 PM local time and spread to North America as the day went on. By the time many people in North America woke up, the outage had been playing out for hours. CrowdStrike worked to fix the problem as quickly as possible, but it took time for individual system administrators to reboot and restore their systems. Some systems remained down even by the end of the day. The outage is a sobering reminder of how reliant we are on technology and how vulnerable our systems are to bugs. It also raises questions about how software updates are tested and deployed. In the future, companies will need to do a better job of ensuring that updates are properly tested before they are rolled out to millions of users.