The entire world was thrown into chaos yesterday after a massive Microsoft outage. Offices, airlines, and almost every digital service ground to a halt, plunging us into a technological nightmare on Friday, July 19. Computer screens flashed the dreaded blue screen of death, and banks, airlines, and broadcasters were suddenly offline.
Amidst this turmoil, one man, Vincent Flibustier, claimed responsibility and became an unexpected internet sensation. Posing as a new employee at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm linked to the outage, he tweeted a cheeky message: “First day at CrowdStrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off.” He accompanied it with a hilariously doctored photo of himself outside the CrowdStrike office. A few hours later, he tweeted again: “Fired. Totally unfair.”
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Flibustier even updated his X (formerly Twitter) bio to match his parody. It read: “Former CrowdStrike employee, fired for an unfair reason, only changed 1 line of code to optimize. Looking for a job as Sysadmin.” He also appealed to X boss Elon Musk for a job. In a deadpan video confession, he recounted his supposed mishap.
First day at Crowdstrike, pushed a little update and taking the afternoon off ✌️ pic.twitter.com/bOs4qAKwu0— Vincent Flibustier (@vinceflibustier) July 19, 2024
“It was my very first day on the job as a new system admin and I was very eager and excited. Let’s say I actually made a small update to a line of code, optimised an update slightly a little bit, and maybe I shouldn’t have. I got fired so I was called in,” he explains in the video.
“They called me back today, telling me that I really need to come back. It really wasn’t even to congratulate me. Now, I’m just waiting for my termination documentation. They told me that you should never put an update into production without testing, especially not on a Friday, and I said, ‘Well, it’s not Friday; it was Thursday, and today is Friday’,” he added.
Vincent Flibustier is actually a writer for the Belgian parody news site Nordpresse. In another video, he revealed that his photo outside the CrowdStrike office was AI-generated and explained the psychology behind his viral success. He noted that people crave narratives that confirm their biases.
Explaining why his joke resonated so well, he said, “No culprit named yet, I bring it on a platter, people like to have a culprit. The culprit seems completely stupid, he is proud of his stupidity, and he takes his afternoon off on the first day of work. This falls right into a huge buzz in which people absolutely need to have new information, and a fake is by nature new, you won’t read it anywhere else.”
How I broke the internet today and what lessons can we learn from it? #Crowdstrike Several things that make it a good fake that worked:1. No culprit named yet, I bring it on a platter, people like to have a culprit.2- The culprit seems completely stupid, he is proud… pic.twitter.com/JFJ2MEYNMQ
— Vincent Flibustier (@vinceflibustier) July 19, 2024
He also warned against taking things at face value online and the spread of misinformation, especially with the rise of generative AI. His videos, too, were translated by AI.
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Purvi KhemaniSub-editor at News18.com, Purvi works for the Viral section and takes care of anything and everything that sets the internet abuzz. Whether it’s crick…Read More
