The fragility of our digital world was exposed this morning as an IT outage brought critical systems across the planet to an abrupt halt.
Invoking the digital doom prophesied by Y2K preppers, businesses from Tottenham to Tokyo were forced to go manual as Microsoft computers everywhere succumbed to the “blue screen of death”, an impassable error message accompanied by an infuriating, sardonic frowny face.
Globally, the disaster led to the cancellation of over three thousand flights along with millions of appointments, and disrupted billions in financial transactions.