Did you escape the ‘blue screen of death’? If so you were lucky, for we have just witnessed the most serious IT outage ever – affecting the lives of millions of people and causing chaos and upheaval around the world. Initially, many wondered if this was a security or cyber-attack but very quickly George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive apologised for the chaos caused, admitting that it was due to a bug in a software update rolled out by the cybersecurity firm affecting 8.5 million Windows PCs worldwide. The infamous ‘blue screen of death’ suddenly appeared as users were locked out of their systems requiring many to be rebooted manually, multiple times, before the updated fix could be applied. In the meantime, the damage and disruption caused was widespread, causing chaos to the lives of many innocent bystanders. More than 3,300 flights were cancelled globally. Railways were suddenly hit by major delays. More significantly hospitals couldn’t always access their systems, and neither could GPs access medical records or give patients the results of blood tests. Banking apps were suddenly taken offline and many large stores such as Morrisons and Waitrose couldn’t take payments, and Sky News was taken off the air.

Fortunately, it seems that no deaths have been caused by this IT outage, but the ripple effect and unintended consequences of this software ‘accident’ are plain for all to see, and the remedy is both time consuming and costly. The Christian will immediately see a parallel between this ‘Crowdstrike’ incident and the notion of original sin as depicted in the Bible, for as the Apostle Paul makes clear, ‘just as sin (and death) entered the world through one man … so death came to all people (the ‘crowd strike’) because all have sinned’ (Romans 5.12). Paul goes on to say that ‘the wages of sin is death’ (actual death and not just a ‘blue screen’) (Romans 6.23) which is much more severe. It seems that sometimes, despite our best intentions, sin has a way of distorting the good that we wish to do and making it less so – and of course deliberate and wilful sin often causes untold damage and chaos not only to ourselves but to the people around us. It also spoils our relationship with God!  Which is why we are so fortunate to have a friend and saviour like Jesus, because through him not only does God take upon himself all of the pain, punishment and guilt of our sinful behaviour as individuals and as communities, but he also takes it away, giving us the opportunity of a reboot – a fresh start when we put our faith and trust in him which is his free gift to all who believe.

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For just as through the disobedience of one person many received the status of ‘sinner’, so through the obedience of one person many will receive the status of ‘in the right’. Romans 5.19 (The Bible for Everyone – N.T. Wright)