The End is Nigh!

Apparently there was some kind of global IT outage today, which threw the world into chaos.  Not that I noticed, as I wasn't catching a flight overseas, wasn't visiting a doctor or picking up a prescription.  I also slept through the 'panic', only finding out about it when I finally got around to checking the news on my tablet.  Of course, every time we have some kind of IT glitch affecting the computer systems of various businesses, all of the usual suspects crawl out of the woodwork, (including that hairy loon who used to be a TV historian and now spends his time foaming at the mouth and spewing apocalyptic gibberish on GB News), to issue dire warnings of how we've become too dependent upon technology and that we're all doomed.  In today's case, there was all sorts of hysteria over the probable collapse of the global banking system, with people unable to use contactless to pay for stuff in shops, or to get money from cash points.  Yeah, it was all so bad that only did I pay for some groceries in Iceland (the shop, not the country) with contactless, but was then able to get some cash from the ATM at the bank.  Listening to the commentariat, you'd think that there had been aircraft falling out of the sky, trains crashing into each other and cars spontaneously exploding.  In reality, the worst that seemed to happen was that Sky News went off the air for a while - which is surely a good thing.  In fact, the only time that I felt remotely in danger today was when I thought that I was going to get swept away by a tidal wave of little girls rushing out of MacDonalds, where they'd been celebrating the end of the school year.

Nevertheless, for the doomsayers this was an earth-shattering event that doubtless heralds the end of the world, (just like any regional conflict, from Ukraine to Gaza, presages the outbreak of World War Three).  I'm guessing that they are the sort of people that, the first time in history one of those new fangled automobiles ran out of petrol, threw their hands in the air and decried the fact that we were now too reliant on this new technology and that now delivery and transport services would collapse, presaging the end of civilisation as they knew it.  Instead of warning about the perils of going cashless, they were warning of the perils of going horseless.  Look, I know that if you, personally, were affected by this outage then it would have been hugely frustrating, but the fact is that not everyone in the world, in fact nowhere near everyone, was affected.  Bearing in mind that this particular outage was caused by a software update, the solution was simply to roll back the update.  I recall that something similar happened to me a few years ago, when The Sleaze (and a whole lot of other Wordpress based sites) displayed a blank screen when you tried to visit them, the result of a plug in updating automatically with a defective update.  The solution was to go into the site's back-end and delete the plug in.  (The main problem was the lack of contrition from those responsible for the plug in, who basically just tried to shrug it off.  Needless to say, many, many users deleted the plugin and never re-installed it).  You see, it's simple to solve these problems!  OK, maybe today's outage wasn't quite as straightforward, although ultimately, it apparently could be solved by simply booting the affected machine into safe mode, accessing the file manager and deleting the offending update.  Having to do that on such a large scale was what caused the delays today when it came to restoring services.  Anyway, to return the original thrust of this post, the moral of today's incident is to keep calm and not listen to the doom sayers trying to stir up panic.