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How a single IT update caused global havoc

Friday's IT outage is a poignant reminder of how reliant the world has become on devices managed remotely by huge firms.

You may never have heard of the anti-virus firm Crowdstrike before but something it did to its virus scanner Falcon had a very adverse effect on computers running Windows software – in their millions. Crowdstrike says it has now issued a fix but several IT contacts have told me every single machine in their organisations will require a manual reboot in safe mode, and some of these devices are likely to be more physically accessible than others. Perhaps a sign of awareness that this could prove to be an extremely expensive mistake, as people missed flights, trains, hospital appointments on a summer Friday.

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