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."