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Comment by addled | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday morning I learned that someone I was acquainted with had just passed away and the funeral is scheduled for next week.

They recently had a stroke at home just days after spending over a month in the hospital.

Then I remembered that they were originally supposed to be getting an important surgery, but it was delayed because of the CrowdStrike outage. It took weeks for the stars to align again and the surgery to happen.

It makes me wonder what the outcome would have been if they had gotten the surgery done that day, and not spent those extra weeks in the hospital with their condition and stressing about their future?

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I appreciate your post here and I'm glad you shared, because it's an example of a distributed harm. One of millions to shake out of this incident, that doesn't have a dollar figure, so it doesn't really "count".

To illustrate:

If I were to do something horrible like kick a 3 year olds knee out and cripple them for life, I would be rightly labeled a monster.

But If I were to say... advocate for education reform to push American Sign Language out of schools, so that deaf children grow up without a developmental language? We don't have words for that, and if we did, none of them would get near the cumulative scope and harm of that act.

We simply do not address distributed harms correctly. And a big part of it is that we don't, we can't, see all the tangible harms it causes.

Not to defend Crowdstrike in any way, but it’s a bit unfair to only look at the downside. What if his hospital hadn’t bought an antivirus, and got hit by ransomware?

Sure, and even if the surgery happened on time, they still might have had a stroke once they got home and had the same outcome.

But as other posts on HN have discussed, anecdotes, especially your own, hit differently.

It makes me thankful the software I work on isn't involved in life and death situations... But then again, it causes me to better consider the things my work could be responsible for (banking). Rushed work that causes a loan application to fail or transaction to be held unnecessarily shouldn't kill someone outright, but there can be real consequences that affect real people just like Rita.

Who needs ransomware when your antivirus platform is perfectly capable of bricking your computer systems?

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