IT support — Blog — Healy Chen

Back your ass up

As an IT support monkey, one of the worst parts of the job is having to tell the customer their data is gone. Even when the data loss is through no faults of my own (of which sadly I have done once), the empath in me feels tremendous guilt for delivering the final negative verdict to the hopeful customer. Obviously, no one likes to hear bad news. If you’re the people-pleasing type (that’s me), you want to avoid being the messenger at all costs.

Friendly reminder: have backups of your digital life. A single point of failure can indeed fail at anytime, sometimes with no one to blame but god.

It’s frustrating when I am unable to book plane tickets via the Chase travel portal. (I want to use my credit card points, and get 5X back on the purchase, obviously.) Apparently, the portal might not show all available seating configurations, or that particular flight at all. Of course, the safest option is always to book directly with the airline, but then I would be losing out on precious reward points. Not in this economy! At least for me, I’ve never had an issue in all the years booking stuff through the Chase travel portal.

Due to the ticket unavailability on the portal, I had to book my fight directly with China Southern Airlines. Their website looks like it barely made it out of Web 1.0 era design language. I guess it’s easier to manage the backend when the frontend isn’t fancifully full of code. But who cares about shiny coats of paint so long as a website functions correctly. After a bit of clunkiness, I was able to book my ticket for the 2025 trip back home to China.

Instead of getting back 5% on my thousands of dollar, I have to settle for 2%. Very sad!

It's inside the house!

Pour one out for the IT support homies out there having to deal with this CrowdStrike fiasco.

If I understand the situation correctly: CrowdStrike is a Microsoft Windows security software that lives in the kernel (read: deep) level to protect systems from outside attack. The company rolled out an automatic update last Friday that broke any computer it is installed on. (The threat is coming from inside the house!) PCs all over the world restarted to the infamous blue screen of death. What’s worse: IT support has to essentially go to each and every endpoint to resolve this massive problem. CrowdStrike can’t simply roll out a fix en masse.

That’s why as of today - three days later - flights are still being cancelled. It will take quite some time for things to return to normal.

I am in the IT support business, but thankfully our organization does not deploy CrowdStrike. Last Friday was just a normal Friday for us. Praise be.

You know who’s got to be having a bad year? Lloyd's of London. The UK company is famous for selling insurance to cover extraordinary events. If you ever wonder how a sticky situation plays out in terms of insurance, Lloyd’s is probably behind it. Like the container ship that ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. That is a hefty, hefty insurance bill that the likes of State Farm would never dare to underwrite.

Similarly, this CrowdStrike disaster is affecting hospitals, airlines, banks - a ton of crucial businesses. Whoever underwrites CrowdStrike's insurance policy - probably Lloyd's - got to be sweating bullets.