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The IT Outage That Took Us Back to the Basics: Radio Will Learn From This

“This is a classic case of what happens when one supplier catches a cold, and the rest of us end up with the flu.”

Cybersecurity expert David Cullen pretty much nails it when summing up Friday’s global IT outage, which knocked radio stations around the country off air.

With automated playout systems impacted by issues with CrowdStrike software, and the ‘blue screen of death’ looming large, stations were left scrambling to do the best they could with whatever resources they had at hand.

Staff got creative. Producers dashed home to grab their CD collections. triple j’s Abby Butler manually played the news theme into her mic, directly from her phone. 2GB Drive host Chris O’Keefe was still able to take phone calls, but with no ad breaks or pre-recorded content available, he was forced to talk for nearly three hours non-stop.

At Hope 103.2, Stephen Wilkinson panelled the emergency program and read from the paper.

Nova’s Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel remained on air, one of the only Drive shows still able to broadcast live.

Their Instagram post read: “A nationwide Microsoft outage has SHUT DOWN Australian radio … except for us!! We’re doing it old school around the country right now on Nova!”

Microsoft now estimates that eight and a half million computers around the world were disabled as a result of the outage.

Radio Futurologist James Cridland says there will be learnings from this.

“Some emergency playout system is probably a good idea to consider somehow; or, at least, having a few CD players available somewhere.”

“But it’s been a busy few days for IT teams, many of whom have had to physically reset every single computer that was affected.”

CrowdStrike has since apologised for the outage and Microsoft says while the underlying cause has been fixed, there’s been a ‘residual impact’ on some apps and services.

First published by RadioToday. Read original here