On July 19, the world screeched, sputtered, and stalled before grinding to a sudden stop. Planes no longer soared through the clouds; news agencies were knocked off the air; emergency phone hotlines were inactivated. Approximately 8.5 million computer systems crashed and couldn’t be restarted. It was a global disaster — with a price tag that surpassed the annual GNPs of entire countries.
The culprit? A cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike distributed a faulty software update, and it didn’t realize that there were significant problems and errors until it was too late. The New York Times dubbed it “the glitch felt around the world.”
Sadly, it’s a recurring problem in tech: The downside of updates.
And so, the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, did what a responsible chief executive should do: He got in front of the story, took responsibility, and was transparent with the public, letting everyone know that it’s “not a security incident or a cyberattack.” It was just a mistake – and it was a mistake, Kurtz insisted, that they’d immediately fix.
Sure, the CrowdStrike stock price took a pounding, dropping by nearly 12%. But tech companies can recover from a 12% drop. They shake it off, learn from their errors, and rebuild trust and customer loyalty. By its very nature, tech requires innovation, experimentation, and trying different things. Sometimes, things don’t run perfectly.
And sometimes, they’re not just imperfect – they’re disastrous. Because of the CrowdStrike crash, over 138,000 flights were delayed – and over 12,000 were canceled. That’s an awful lot of angry passengers.
Related: The DOT Is Investigating One Airline's Struggles After the Crowdstrike Outage
But CrowdStrike will recover because it was honest, respectful, and straightforward. Your target audience doesn’t demand perfection, but it does expect to be treated honestly and respectfully. That’s exactly what another tech executive, Steve Jobs, did in 2010 when the iPhone 4 had a faulty antenna. He addressed the problem head-on, declaring, “We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We know that; you know that. But we want to make all our users happy.” Apple then offered everyone with an iPhone 4 a free new case (which protected the antenna) and his tech team fixed the problem with the iPhone 5.
Steve Jobs acknowledged his mistake. He was honest. He made a good-faith effort to solve it. And so Apple emerged from the near-fiasco with its reputation almost completely unscathed. 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 irrelevant, let’s segue to Joe Biden: When the Democrats were faced with a crisis communications problem of their own – namely, a presidential candidate who was senile, incompetent, and unelectable – they did the opposite of CrowdStrike.
They weren’t honest. They weren’t straightforward. They didn’t acknowledge the problem – and they certainly didn’t assume responsibility for the problem.
Instead, 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 over and over again that he would “never” drop out of the presidential race – because doing so would disenfranchise all those millions of Americans who voted for him in the primaries. And that just wouldn’t be fair!
After all, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
The same people who lied about Trump being a Russian asset – and lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop being fake – and insisted that, behind the scenes, President Biden was actually an intellectual dynamo who had so much youth and vigor, his staffers couldn’t keep up – never came clean about their previous lies before moving on to the next one: Biden is now too senile to campaign for President, but he’s still smart enough to serve as President. (Somehow, he’s smack-dab in the senility sweet spot, I suppose.)
With their words, the Democrats claim that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. Via their actions, however, they hid the truth about Biden’s condition; they lied to the American people; they disenfranchised millions of primary voters; and now, they’re switching presidential ballots not because of high moral standards… but because they’re afraid they might lose.
It raises an interesting question for Kamala Harris: Did she know that Biden was mentally incompetent yet participated in the cover-up anyway, despite all the dangers and risks to our country? Or was she just too stupid to recognize that her boss was senile?
For all the talk about democracy dying in darkness, it’s probably worth noting that the only reason Biden could continue to perpetuate his intellectual fraud was by clinging to the darkness – and what finally killed his 2024 candidacy wasn’t the darkness at all.
It was the light.
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