Corporate workers get a snow day in July because of outage

LAS VEGAS - It is a sensation familiar to anyone who has seen the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. You wake up and find yourself with an unexpected day of freedom. And on July 19, people did not even have to fake a fever or dodge a tempestuous school principal.

For millions of people, the global technology outage on July 19 was a source of distress. Airports were filled with disgruntled would-be travellers. Hospitals cancelled non-critical procedures, and emergency lines went down in several states in the US.

But for a small group of corporate workers, the global outage brought a welcome kind of chaos – a snow day in the middle of July.

Some workers affected by the outage shared images of their computers on social media captioned “happy international blue screen day”, referencing the error messages that overtook screens during the outage.

On TikTok, users posted about clocking in only to find “the blue screen of death” (or hoping they would, for an extra day off).

CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm whose software update led to the outage, counts about 70 per cent of Fortune 100 companies as customers.

That means workers in cubicles all over the world felt the effects right away. JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America and BlackRock were among the large financial firms affected.

“The reason why this particular outage was so visible is that the largest companies were hit,” said Mr Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at WithSecure, a cyber-security company. “They don’t control the whole cyber-security market, but they do have a very large percentage of the largest companies in the world.”

Mr Yeves Perez, a founder of start-up Workbnb, who lives in Las Vegas, woke up at 6am on July 19 and was feeding his two children when he saw that he had a pile-up of e-mails cancelling his meetings for the day.

He turned on CNN and saw news of the outage. Then he scrolled through social media and saw memes – which turned out to be misinformation – showing error messages on the face of the Sphere, an event venue in Las Vegas with 700,000 sq ft of programmable screens.

“It felt like that movie on Netflix – that chaos situation of nobody knows what’s going on,” Mr Perez said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, everybody’s just taking the day off.’”

Mr Perez figured that many of his friends and business associates who were visiting Las Vegas for work would be hitting the pools.

“Here in Vegas, there’s no shortage of summer fun,” he said. “I’m planning to barbecue. I’ll have people over, chill in the backyard, crack some beers.”

Amid the tumult, a handful of freed-up workers were openly celebrating, or as one user posted on social media platform X: “I sent ‘hope everyone’s having a nice International Bluescreen Day’ to the group chat.”

Mr Rohan Brown, an entrepreneur, had spent the past few days hosting an event called Pitch Mayhem, in which start-up founders gathered in Las Vegas to share pitches in a “March Madness meets Shark Tank”-style competition.

The event ended on July 18, which is when Mr Brown’s week turned into actual mayhem. His flight out of Las Vegas was cancelled, and he missed four meetings as he scrambled to rebook. But the people on the other end of his e-mails were just as flustered.

“For one of my meetings, they just responded and said, ‘Hey, we’re taking the whole day off,’” Mr Brown said. NYTIMES