All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It’s all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.
Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.
Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We’ll see if that changes over the weekend…
There are a lot of heavy manufacturing tools that are controlled and have their interface handled by Windows under the hood.
They’re not all networked, and some are super old, but a more modernized facility could easily be using a more modern version of Windows and be networked to have flow of materials, etc more tightly integrated into their systems.
The higher precision your operation, the more useful having much more advanced logs, networked to a central system, becomes in tracking quality control. Imagine after the fact, you can track some .1% of batches that are failing more often and look at the per second logs of temperature they were at during the process, and see that there’s 1° temperature variance between the 30th to 40th minute that wasn’t experience by the rest of your batches. (Obviously that’s nonsense because I don’t know anything about the actual process of steel manufacturing. But I do know that there’s a lot of industrial manufacturing tooling that’s an application on top of windows, and the higher precision your output needs to be, the more useful it is to have high quality data every step of the way.)