Coding matters: Computer zombies

AI generated image showing two zombie-type heads that are part computer monitor.

Tech news has been full of the Crowdstrike incident. A faulty update caused over 8.5 million Windows machines to crash. It affected every industry: airlines, banks, hotels, hospitals, manufacturing, retail and government. Now Crowdstrike is being sued – but that’s a topic for another day.

Delta Airlines is the 2nd largest airline in the US. It claims the outage caused a loss of $500 million. Southwest Airlines is the 4th largest airline in the US. Its loss? $0.

The Southwest computer zombie

Southwest wasn’t protected because it was running Linux or MacOS. It wasn’t protected because it had some amazing security.

Southwest was protected from the outage because it’s still running Windows 3.1!

Some of you are too young to ever have seen Windows 3.1. It lived, died and was buried a long time ago. Microsoft launched Windows 3.1 in 1992, and ended support for it at the end of 2001. I guess some things are hard to kill.

Southwest is probably happy to have skipped the Crowdstrike outage. But it must be equally embarrassed by the reason for it. Especially as its outdated systems were heavily criticised 18 months ago. Those old systems resulted in many cancelled flights and unhappy customers when a large storm hit the US on 29 December 2022.

Your computer zombie

Almost every company has one of the living dead.

It’s that old Windows PC that hasn’t been updated in more than 10 years. It’s running an obscure program that someone wrote a long time ago. Nobody quite knows how it works. But there are a handful of people who absolutely need whatever it does.

Years ago I was consulting for a big company. It has thousands of employees, runs SAP, has a large IT department, and lots of technical consultants.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered their zombie computer. (One IT manager knew about it, and wanted nothing to do with it.) It ran an old program written by a technically-minded buyer in the Supply Chain department. And it provided critical information for some very big expenditure.

It’s not the first zombie computer I’ve come across at a client. And I’ve heard plenty of zombie stories.

Some more old zombies

In January 2024, a German railway firm posted an unusual job ad. The company manages most of the railway display boards in Germany. It wanted to employ someone with MS DOS and Windows 3.11 experience to run their system. Apparently the system has a BIOS dating from 1996, a 166MHz processor and a whopping 8MB of RAM. (You can find this story here.)

And here’s an even older zombie. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency apparently still uses 5.25-in. floppy disks to run the city’s light rail. Every morning, the system boots up three floppy disks to load the Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) software. (You can find this story and some others here).

Why so many zombies?

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That’s one reason why there are still old computers running old software. There are probably other reasons as well.

It’s often about the money. For small businesses, the cost of an upgrade might not be justified.

For big companies, it’s more complicated. Often nobody knows how that program works, why it works, or what it needs. It might not be compatible with anything else. So you don’t dare touch it, and just hope it doesn’t crash. And if your company uses big serious software like SAP, you want to keep it as vanilla as possible. Customisations cost time and money, and create upgrade issues. So these programs get left behind and ignored.

Until they rise to the surface, like a zombie from the grave.

Zombie survival guide

Ok, I got a bit carried away with the zombie theme there. And there is no actual zombie survival guide.

In the Southwest case, the zombies won – but that’s just one battle. There are battles for cybersecurity, faster speed and better user experience. And you don’t want the zombies to win. Cyber experts recommend regular software updates to protect against security vulnerabilities. There will always be a risk with updates. I suppose that’s the cost of fighting zombies.

I’d love to hear your story about zombie computers. Share your comments on the blog post.

P.S. The image is AI-generated. Not quite what I wanted, but you get the idea.

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