The global Microsoft computer outage initiated by a faulty CrowdStrike security update gave us a taste of what actual cyberwarfare could do.

Starting soon after midnight New York time, the glitched update brought the “blue screen of death” to PCs across the world.

Microsoft has issued advice to users after a massive outage linked to U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike caused users' systems to suddenly crash.

"We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state," an update posted on the Microsoft Azure website said on Friday morning. "We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July."

I’m willing to bet that, until this morning, most people had never heard of CrowdStrike, an Austin-based cybersecurity firm. Only after the company pushed a bad update onto Windows computers, creating the biggest IT disaster in history, did most of us realize how much our lives depend on it. Or how difficult it might be to fix the problem.

Although US coal consumption has fallen dramatically since 2005, the country still consumes millions of tons a year, and exports tons more—much of it transported by train. Now, new research shows that these trains can affect the health of people living near where they pass.

The California Labor Commissioner's Office has fined Amazon a total of $5.9 million on allegations the company violated a state law by working warehouse employees so hard that their safety was put at risk.

The two citations, which were issued in May, said Amazon.com Services LLC violated the state's Warehouse Quota Law at facilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the labor commissioner's office said Tuesday in a press release.

Amazon was fined $1.2 million at a warehouse in Redlands and $4.7 million at another warehouse in Moreno Valley.

The 21 crew members stuck on the ship that caused the deadly Baltimore bridge collapse are reportedly having a “tough” time after not being able to leave the vessel for 55 days.

The crew — all from India, except for one man from Sri Lanka — has been forced to stay onboard since the March 26 disaster, which brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge and killed six construction workers.

A bipartisan Senate panel is introducing legislation to tackle the mounting crisis of generic prescription drug shortages.

“It’s unacceptable that America is consistently running out of affordable and essential generic medicines,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) said Friday in a press statement. “Our bipartisan proposal uses the power of Medicare and Medicaid to ensure the entire American health system has adequate supply for key medicines across the country.”

With no work emails or phone calls it’s mostly been “scary quiet” for Theresa Abel since March 26, when a huge container vessel crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, bringing down the span, killing six workers and clogging the main shipping channel that connected the city’s port with the rest of the world.

The Biden administration on Friday announced a regulation designed to turbocharge sales of electric or other zero-emission heavy vehicles, from school buses to cement mixers, as part of its multifront attack on global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency projects the new rule could mean that 25 percent of new long-haul trucks, the heaviest on the road, and 40 percent of medium-size trucks, like box trucks and landscaping vehicles, could be nonpolluting by 2032. Today, fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold in the United States fit that bill.