July 19 Tech Outage Could Cost Over Five Billion Dollars

 

Last Friday, a massive global tech outage affected many thousands from airport travelers to 911 callers to hospital workers as data and communication became unavailable.  Airlines were particularly hard hit, some still having many more delayed flights for days. CNN reported one insurance company stated the crash, "will cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses."

 

Crowdsrtike would also issue a report about what went wrong, saying that it came from part of it's security system that checks for hacking on customer's computers and smartphones after an update was made which was glitched. While it's updates are screened before being released, there was a bug in the system that allowed it to get through, “despite containing problematic content data.”The result was the "blue screen of death" on millions of computers and smartphones, which could only be delt with by manual operations, sometimes over and over and over.

For more information, check CNN. 

Bixyl Shuftan

The SL Ninety-Nines

While at the SL9B, Grey Lupindo heard about a group of women virtual pilots in Second Life: the 99s. Based on a real-life aviation group, they encourage women to take to the skies. Grey reports on the group, and describes her first experiences in the pilots seat.

Read Grey's story in People.