Inundated IT workers commiserate, marvel at 'historic' CrowdStrike outage

• IT professionals convened on Reddit to mourn and marvel at the "historic" outage.
• The issue, linked to CrowdStrike, has brought various sectors to their knees.
• "Hug your IT guy," one Redditor wrote. "He needs it."

In addition to sparking global chaos, a mass outage linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is inspiring a wave of commiseration among IT professionals.

A bustling thread on Reddit with 18,000 comments (and counting) saw some coming to kiss their weekends goodbye, and others marveling at what they called a "historic" event.

One expert called Friday's update the largest IT outage of all time.

"In my 25+ years of being in IT, this is the most epic thing I've ever experienced," one Redditor wrote. "It's probably the outage folks feared leading up to Y2K. Maybe worse."

"429 support calls and climbing," another Redditor fumed, while a third who claimed to work for a Fortune 500 company added: "We're decapitated."

Microsoft has suggested some affected users have rebooted their devices up to 15 times to troubleshoot the issue.

And as the outage has brought numerous sectors to a standstill — among them travel, banking, retail, and healthcare — some Redditors mustered sympathy for those tasked inevitably with shepherding the repairs.

"Respects to the engineers everywhere who have lost their nights and weekends fixing this mess," one wrote, "and to the poor help desk people at CrowdStrike."

"Hug your IT guy," another Redditor concluded. "He needs it."