On July 19, the universe screeched, sputtered, and stalled before grinding to a sudden halt. Planes no more soared through the clouds, emergency phone hotlines were purified, and news organizations were taken off the air. Approximately 8.5 million computer systems crashed and could n’t be restarted. It was a worldwide devastation, costing more than the annual GNPs of all of the nations.
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The suspect? A cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike distributed a flawed software update, and it did n’t realize there were serious issues and errors until it was too late. It was described as” the glitch felt around the world,” according to the New York Times.
Ironically, it’s a recurring issue in software: The downside of updates.
And so, the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, did what a dependable chief executive should do: He got in front of the narrative, took responsibility, and was visible with the people, letting everyone know that it’s” not a security event or a cyberattack”. It was just a blunder – and it was a blunder, Kurtz insisted, that they’d instantly resolve.  ,
Sure, the CrowdStrike stock price took a hammering, dropping by roughly 12 %. However, tech companies you return from a 10 % decline. They shake it off, understand from their mistakes, and restore confidence and buyer loyalty. By its very nature, software requires advancement, experimentation, and trying various things. Sometimes, things do n’t run perfectly.
And often, they’re not really imperfect – they’re devastating. Because of the CrowdStrike accident, over 138, 000 planes were delayed – and over 12, 000 were canceled. That’s an awful lot of unhappy customers.
Relevant:  , The DOT Is Investigating One Airline’s Struggles After the Crowdstrike Outage
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But CrowdStrike may recover because it was sincere, respectful, and clear. Your target audience does n’t need beauty, but it does expect to be treated seriously and politely. That’s exactly what another tech executive, Steve Jobs, did in 2010 when the phone 4 had a faulty transmitter. He addressed the problem head-on, declaring,” We’re never great. Phones are n’t perfect. We know that, you know that. However, we want to satisfy all of our customers. Then Apple gave away a free new case ( protecting the antenna ) to everyone who had an iPhone 4 and his tech team found a fix for the issue with the iPhone 5.
Steve Jobs acknowledged his error. He was sincere. He made a good-faith effort to resolve the issue. And thus Apple emerged from the near-fiasco almost entirely unhurt. At the time,” Antenna-gate” was a potential billion-dollar PR disaster … and today, it’s totally, completely, 100 % irrelevant to the public.
And speaking of unimportant, this transition to Joe Biden: When the Democrats were faced with a turmoil communications issue of their own – namely, a political candidate who was senile, ignorant, and unelectable – they did the opposite of CrowdStrike.
They were n’t honest. They were n’t straightforward. They refused to acknowledge the issue, and they made no such assumption that they were to blame.
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Rather, they lied about Joe Biden’s health.  ,
Repeatedly.
They claimed that any video evidence to the contrary must be “deep-fakes” and “election interference” . ,
Repeatedly.
Biden vowed repeatedly that he would “never” withdraw from the race for president because doing so would disqualify all the millions of Americans who voted for him in the elections. And that just would n’t be fair!  ,
After all,” Democracy dies in darkness” . ,
The same people who falsely claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a fake and that President Biden was actually an intellectual dynamo who had so much youth and vigor that his staffers could n’t keep up, never acknowledged their previous lies before moving on to the next one: Biden is now too senile to run for president but he’s still smart enough to serve as president. ( Somehow, he’s smack-dab in the senility sweet spot, I suppose. )
The Democrats assert in their comments that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to our republic. Via their steps, but, they hid the truth about Biden’s state, they lied to the American people, they disenfranchised millions of major voters, and then, they’re switching political ballots not because of high moral standards… but because they’re afraid they might drop.
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Kamala Harris is left with a fascinating problem: Did she know that Biden was mentally incapable yet still participated in the cover-up despite all the dangers and risks to our nation? Or was she simply to illiterate to realize that her employer was a senile?  ,
Despite all the talk of democracy dying in the dark, it’s probably worth noting that the only way Biden could continue to commit academic forgery was by clinging to the darkness, and that is n’t what ultimately caused his 2024 election.
It was the lighting.
