Tech CEO Offers Trash Defense for Global Microsoft Outage

Trains and planes around the world were stalled and grounded Friday due to an international Microsoft outage during what was supposed to be a routine update from a cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.

In what has been described as the “largest IT outage in history,” CrowdStrike’s catastrophic error fumbled every sector of the working world, from banks to hospitals, law enforcement, and McDonalds. But an update from CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, early Friday was surprisingly unapologetic and so bogged down in legalese that it was immediately read to filth by its customers.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

“We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” he continued. “We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

Critics quickly observed that, despite the fact that the failure likely caused millions of dollars’ worth of damages around the globe, Kurtz refused to take any modicum of blame by writing the statement entirely in customer service jargon and by aggressively dodging any word combination that precisely identified the problem, offered a solution, or simply said, “I’m sorry.”

“It comes off as cowardly and callous,” wrote former Activision Blizzard CCO Lulu Cheng Meservey. “People might have died. And the CEO is not sorry.”

Kurtz had a significantly more human—albeit still callous—update in an interview with NBC News.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” Kurtz told the news outlet. “Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them. So it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover.”

On Instagram Live early Friday morning, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed the ongoing debate over whether President Biden is fit to run for reelection.

Speaking for close to an hour, the New York progressive explained her support of Biden and why she thought replacing him was a bad idea.

“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave ... that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez attacked her fellow Democrats who have spoken anonymously to the press about Biden, particularly those resigned to defeat in November.

“My community does not have the option to lose,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations.”

“A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

As far as a plan for replacing Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said that whenever she has asked, she hasn’t gotten an answer.

“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court? And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

She noted that the convention is in less than a month, and that Michigan has to finalize their ballot two days after the convention, which could result in a legal crisis. Ocasio-Cortez said she was concerned that these factors aren’t being considered by Democrats in the replacement camp.

Recent reports say Biden dropping out of the race is increasingly likely, and could happen in a matter of days. The president appears to be strongly considering the idea after meeting with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and reportedly even former president Barack Obama thinks Biden needs to reconsider running. A major West Coast donor has already drafted a withdrawal speech.

Watch Ocasio-Cortez’s full remarks on Instagram Live here:

Donald Trump unleashed so many falsehoods during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that it seemed to overwhelm CNN’s on-air fact checker. 

After Trump’s appearance Thursday night, CNN’s Daniel Dale ran through a lengthy list of Trump’s lies, having to brush past several on his list because he was running out of time to dispute each baseless claim. 

During his speech, Trump had claimed that his opponents inherited a world “at peace.”

“Trump did not achieve world peace when he was president; certainly wasn’t at peace when he left office,” Dale explained. “There were active wars or armed conflicts in dozens of nations in 2020: 51 by one research institution’s count, and then 51 again in 2021.”

“Trump handed President Biden ongoing civil wars in Yemen and Syria, of course, an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli-Iranian conflict, a war in Ethiopia,” Dale explained. There were also the U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil war in Somalia, insurgents fighting Africa’s Sahel region, violent clashes between drug cartels in Mexico, to name a few others, according to CNN.  

“I could go on for a while, but I don’t have time because there were so many other false claims. So let’s address some of those, not even all of them,” said Dale. He later noted that Trump falsely claimed to have defeated “100 percent of ISIS.” 

“In fact, the ISIS caliphate was declared fully liberated more than two years into his presidency,” Dale said. 

Trump “repeated his usual lie about Democrats having cheated in the 2020 election. It’s nonsense,” Dale said. During his speech, Trump offhandedly claimed that Democrats had somehow managed to use the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat in the 2020 election. 

“He said crime is going up. The opposite is true. It’s gone sharply down in 2023 and early 2024. It’s now lower than it was under Trump in 2020,” Dale said. Trump has repeatedly made claims about an increase in violent crime and tried to blame it on undocumented immigrants. 

Not only has Trump’s campaign failed to provide any evidence of a surge in crime committed by migrants, there has been no increase in violent crime to speak of. More importantly, U.S. citizens are proven to commit crimes at a higher rate than undocumented immigrants. Still, Trump falsely claimed that other countries were releasing people from prisons and mental institutions into the United States. 

Trump also “said we have the worst inflation we’ve ever had. Again, not even close. It is 3 percent right now. The U.S. record is 23.7 percent. He said there was no inflation under him. It was low, of course, but not nonexistent—it was 8 percent total for his presidency, 1.4 percent year over year in the month he left office,” Dale said.

Trump also lied about the price of groceries, according to Dale: “He said the price of groceries is up 57 percent under Biden. It’s actually 21 percent.”

Apparently, plenty of Trump’s numbers were all over the place. The former president “said Democrats are proposing to quadruple people’s taxes. That is imaginary. He said his tax cut was the largest in American history, not even close again,” Dale explained. A report from the Congressional Budget Office found that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama had each facilitated larger tax cuts than Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. 

Much like Trump’s speech, which seemed to go on and on into eternity (it was a whopping 92 minutes), his lies continued to stack up. 

Trump claimed that the government had recently hired 88,000 IRS agents, but that number appears to be from a projection from a 2021 Treasury Department report, which predicted the agency could bring in roughly 87,000 new hires in the next decade, thanks to $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Trump “said the Biden administration does nothing to stop migrants. Well, the administration tried to get Congress to pass a bill to tighten the border, and after Trump himself helped to kill that bill, Biden took executive action to tighten the border.” Dale said. “Trump said he stopped human trafficking. Again, not true.”

Trump made plenty of false claims about his business dealings with China, claiming that the country had “stopped buying oil from Iran under him,” Dale said. “Also did not happen.”

On Thursday night, Donald Trump took the stage to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency in a speech anticipated to be the grand finale of the four-day long event in Milwaukee. Instead, he put his own fan base to sleep.

Trump began his speech around 9 p.m. Central time, recounting the details of his recent near-death experience to an—initially—rapt audience. But according to some present at the convention, the energy evacuated the room as the 93-minute speech, “the longest nomination acceptance speech at a convention” per NBC News, stretched languorously into the evening.

At 10:46 p.m., Financial Times journalist Edward Luce tweeted from the convention, “People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena. Trump is boring the audience.” A few minutes later, from a “sea of [Trump] diehards” just some paces from the stage, Atlantic reporter Tim Alberta posted, “some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over.”

One X user observed, “People are visibly falling asleep,” clipping a wide shot of the audience from CBS News’s broadcast, in which more than one attendee can be seen being lulled to sleep—slumped in their chairs, with heads bowed and eyelids heavy—as Trump droned on.

As the speech finally came to a close and balloons fell on the convention, a rendition of the operatic aria “Nessun dorma” rang through the hall. The song’s title and opening lines are Italian for “Nobody shall sleep,” but, apparently, some shall.

Unverified reporting from Newsmax commentator Mark Halperin set the far-right network ablaze Thursday night with word that President Joe Biden would step aside before the weekend, but would not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris while doing so.

In a bid to understand just how this would be received, Newsmax turned to a curious person to speak on behalf of the Black community: Don Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle.

“And I mean, recent polling shows, I mean, we have Kamala looking worse than Joe Biden in these swing states,” prompted Newsmax host Rob Schmidt. “If they do that, how are Black women going to respond when you try to subvert the woman on the screen?”

“Well, they’re going to be very unhappy,” Guilfoyle said, completely speculating. “I mean, Joe Biden chose her because he said she was the best person to serve as vice president of the United States.”

“But to pass over her is going to be a huge problem, probably with African-American Black voters, Black women voters, all of the above.”

It wasn’t Guilfoyle’s only flub of the convention. Speaking before the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Guilfoyle blatantly lied about the quality of the jobs market when Donald Trump left office. She also suggested that she recently spoke to the centenarian veterans who fought in World War II about the unrecognizable nature of the U.S. while conveniently forgetting that it was fascism—not communism—that America fought in the war.

The soon-to-be Trump was also caught in an unfortunate visual gaffe just inches behind Trump’s head on Thursday night when she was caught aggressively grabbing her crotch on live television.

Before Donald Trump capped off the Republican National Convention with his speech accepting the party’s nomination for president, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan took the stage.

Trump seemed to really appreciate Hogan’s speech, delivered in the wrestler’s over-the-top passionate style. During the speech, the Hulkster even did his trademark T-shirt rip, discarding a black “Real Americans” muscle shirt to reveal a red Trump-Vance T-shirt underneath.

“They tried to kill the next president of the United States. Enough was enough, and I said, let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again!” Hogan shouted, pointing at the crowd, who responded with chants of “USA, USA!”

Trump appreciated Hogan’s theatrics so much that he pumped his fist and blew kisses at the former wrestler.

Why Hogan was at the RNC to begin with isn’t known, although it may have had something to do with his relationship with right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who funded his lawsuit against Gawker Media over the leak of a sex tape. Or it might have been because of Trump’s long relationship with World Wrestling Entertainment. Either way, Hogan’s job was to hype up the RNC crowd of “Real Americans,” and he succeeded, only for Trump to deliver a speech that went on way too long.

It appears that not everyone at the Republican National Convention was loving Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night. What began as an intense retelling of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally on Saturday gradually devolved into the same meandering, anti-immigration fearmongering Trump has touted throughout his campaign.

Dispatches on X, formerly Twitter, from within Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum said that Trump had a little trouble holding the crowd’s attention, as his speech stretched to one hour and 32 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance speech on record.

“People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena,” wrote Edward Luce, an associate editor at the Financial Times, who weighed in a little over an hour into Trump’s speech. “Trump is boring the audience.”

Around the same time, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote that even in the middle of the crowd, people were growing impatient. “I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over,” he posted.

Wajahat Ali, a columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that there were “a lot of concerned faces in the RNC crowd right now.”

“Definitely a different energy from an hour ago. I think some people are going, ‘Uh … what’s happening,’” he said.

While the energy in the room started high, with a wild appearance from Hulk Hogan and a weird rap performance from Kid Rock, Trump couldn’t keep the excitement alive as he worked his way through all the same beats as ever, sounding a bit more subdued than in his typical rants.

Donald Trump promised a massive deportation plan Thursday night, even larger than the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history: President Dwight Eisenhower’s racist-named “Operation Wetback.”

The former president was doing his typical fearmongering, blaming immigrants for any and all of the country’s ills, when he decided to name-drop the thirty-fourth U.S. president.

“And bad things are gonna happen, and you’re gonna see it happen all the time,” said Trump. “And that’s why the Republican platform promises to launch the biggest deportation operation in the history of our country. Even larger than that of Dwight D. Eisenhower, from many years ago.”

Under that program, which was implemented “many years ago” in 1954, U.S. authorities employed military-style tactics to deport around 1.3 million Mexican immigrants, some of whom had been naturalized. The government packed people into trucks en masse, and shipped them to locations without food and water, resulting in many unnecessary deaths.

During Trump’s speech Thursday on the final night of the Republican National Convention, he continued to baselessly claim that countries around the world were sending people from their prisons and mental institutions to the United States.

The former president also claimed that illegal immigrants were responsible for taking all the American jobs … even faster than they could possibly be created, it seems?

“Today our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens,” he said, claiming they were taking the jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans, as well as unions.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats used the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat during the last presidential election.

During his speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention, Trump made a strange claim while talking about a failed deal he’d tried to make with Iran, ahead of the 2020 election.

“Iran was gonna make a deal with us, and then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again,” he said.

“They used Covid to cheat. We’re never gonna let it happen again,” Trump insisted, a strange shift in his election denialism.

Of course, Trump has been a broken record when it comes to believing he was cheated out of the White House. Earlier in his speech, Trump remarked that the Biden administration wasn’t “fierce” except for “cheating on elections, and a couple of other things.” But suggesting that Democrats had taken advantage of the deadly Covid-19 virus is a uniquely untethered claim, though it’s not totally clear how that would be even possible.

Earlier on Thursday, Lara Trump suggested that the former president had learned to embrace mail-in voting, a tactic pushed by Democrats in the previous election for the sake of public health. At the time, Trump heavily (and falsely) criticized the tactic as being rife with fraud.

A top West Coast Democratic donor has reportedly drafted and begun circulating a seven-step swan song for President Joe Biden.

The “victory speech,” which was obtained Thursday by The Daily Beast, contains seven bullet points for Biden to use, should he decide to withdraw from the presidential race.

The main points of the speech emphasize the importance of saving America and democracy, and insist that to do that, the Democrats must win. But for that to happen, Democrats need to reclaim the confidence of the American people.

The speech would maintain Biden’s position that he thinks he could still succeed in beating Trump in November, but concede that Americans desire a candidate who is younger than Biden or Trump. Biden would declare that for that reason, he has decided to leave the ticket and pass the torch to the next generation.

The speech would also have Biden pledge his support for a cease-fire in Gaza and promise to back the Democratic candidate. Notably, the speech does not have him hand over his candidacy to a specific politician, such as Vice President Kamala Harris. It also gently sidesteps the widespread criticisms of Biden’s disastrous debate performance and questions about his mental acuity.

Biden has been faced with calls from top Democrats to reconsider his candidacy in the race against Donald Trump, as well as frozen funds from several major donors who have decided to pause their six-figure contributions until Biden chooses to step down from the ticket.

While Biden has made no indication that he intends to withdraw, it’s been reported that he has grown “more receptive” to criticisms and is doing some serious “soul searching” about his candidacy.

In the past 36 hours alone, several sources have leaked that the president has had some tough conversations with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who have all urged him to reconsider his candidacy for the sake of the Democratic Party. Former President Barack Obama reportedly told his allies that he feels similarly. Meanwhile, Representatives Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin have both publicly called for Biden to take his leave from the presidential race.

The pressure is mounting against the presumptive Democratic nominee, a title that, for now, should be regularly followed with a question mark.