Allegory of the Cave

A global IT outage, described as “the largest IT outage in history” by Microsoft Regional Director Troy Hunt, occurred on July 19, 2024, affecting millions of Windows-based systems worldwide. Imagine you’re driving on a highway, and suddenly, your GPS starts pointing to a nonexistent road. You keep driving, and before you know it, you're in a ditch because there was no road where your GPS pointed. Something similar happened with a recent CrowdStrike outage, but instead of a car, it involved lines of code, and instead of a ditch, it resulted in a system crash also called Blue screen of Death (BSOD). Let’s dive into what happened, why it happened, and how we can avoid such nightmares in the future. The Culprit: A Null Pointer In the world of programming, a "pointer" is like a GPS for data. It points to a specific location in the computer’s memory where information is stored. In this case, a CrowdStrike developer wrote a piece of code that created a pointer. This pointer was...