Snap, Crackle, Pop.

A faulty system update shuts down computers around the world, affecting marketers in every way, from credit card payments to shipping.

The World’s Biggest ‘Blue Screen of Death’

Let’s start with what it wasn’t: a cyberattack. Many people feared that when computers around the world started crashing.

No, it was a configuration error made by a security company. That company is used by some of the largest firms in the world to manage, update, and secure their Windows computers. Earlier today, that company pushed out an update which crashed at the kernel level — that’s the most sensitive part of a computer’s operating system.

Experts say today’s outage was the largest of its kind in history.

The fallout was enormous

Airlines cancelling hundreds of flights.

Banks scrambling to get people’s payments into accounts on time.

Broadcasters taken off the air.

Borders nearly closed due to long lines.

How it’s affecting marketers

Marketers and brand managers, of course, were affected as well, with many reports of credit card payments not going through.

Shipping companies like UPS and FedEx warned of service delays on the ground — doesn’t sound like things had ground to a halt, but it’s definitely clogging things up. FedEx says the outage triggered its contingency plans for such an event.

There is a fix

The fix is to boot your machine into safe mode, find a specific file, and delete it.

But the problem is that because this file is at the deep kernel level, it has to be done by a human being physically in front of each affected computer. That could be thousands of computers for big companies.

Virtual support tools, which so many IT departments use, won’t work. That’s a huge problem for companies with computers in remote locations, or on server farms where those computers might not even have a monitor or keyboard attached to them.

In some cases, Microsoft says you may need to reboot the computer 15 times in a row for the fix to take.

Shopify and Stripe stay silent

We asked both Shopify and Stripe how their platforms were affected; both opened our email but did not reply.

Google Shortener to Stop Working Next Year

Another shutdown is on the horizon — but this one will be very deliberate, and caused by a company known for killing off its own products.

Google says it will completely shut down its URL shortener next year.

The history

That tool was launched in 2009. It turned any URL into a shorter one using the domain goog.gl.

In 2018, they stopped letting anyone create new ones, which caused a bit of panic at the time because people thought “Wait, are all our links that we made with your service going to just stop working now?” No, Google assured users at the time, your links will be fine. They’ll keep working.

Not any more.

The plan forward

Google now says next year all those links will stop working and will generate 404 File Not Found errors.

You have lots of time — D-day will be August 25 of next year.

And they do plan to start letting users who click those links know it’s coming.

Starting in about a month, those shortlinks will start displaying an interstitial page notifying users that the link will stop working next August.

That message will be shown to only a small percentage of users at first, but that percentage will grow until shutdown day.

Still, it might break some pages

Google warns that the interstitial page might cause disruptions in the current flow of your Google shortlinks.

For example, if you are using 302 redirects, the interstitial page could prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you’ve embedded social metadata in your destination page, Google says that the interstitial page will likely cause those to no longer show up where the initial link is displayed.

If this is happening, you can suppress this interstitial page by adding ?si=1 to existing goo.gl links.

Next steps for marketers

But if you’re going to go into your site to edit those links, you might as well take that time to replace them.

As The Register noted today:

Microsoft Will Keep Ads Away from Competitors

Microsoft’s ads platform is launching “brand lists” for Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, saying the new feature will give you more control over your brand image.

Brand lists are a kind of exclusion list — you can add up to 20 different brands and tell the platform to keep your ads from appearing alongside any of them.

Microsoft has a big list of brands that you can choose from, or you can request specific brands to be added to that list, though that sounds like it goes to a human editorial board that could take up to six weeks to make a decision on adding it to their master list.

One use case would be to keep your ads away from competitors in the market, or brands that don’t align with your values.

Microsoft says the feature will cover misspellings automatically.

Google’s AI at the Olympics: What Could Go Wrong?

Google has been named the official AI sponsor for Team USA at the Olympics, and by “named” I mean they bought the title.

And according to the Verge, they’re going to make sure you know it — all the time.

Get the popcorn out, folks.

I have a feeling we’ll be talking about this again. 🤣

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