Channel 10’s The Project saw the humor in Microsoft’s global systems crash, but the joke cost them dearly when the teleprompter broke down, leaving presenter Waleed Aly speechless.
While the broadcaster was one of many companies and government agencies thrown into chaos by the outage that hit Australia around 3pm on Friday, The Project posted a cheeky X promo that afternoon suggesting it might need to broadcast a test pattern.
“This show tonight is going to be so good,” the tweet read.
When the 6:30pm broadcast began, it was the live panel show that appeared on the screens instead of the static test footage. However, it soon became clear that something was still amiss.
As the panel discussed the massive technical glitch that was causing chaos around the world, host Waleed Aly suddenly stopped talking because the autocue had a glitch. “I thought this was the end,” he said.
However, when Aly started giving a summary of the day’s news, starting with the US presidential election, he soon found himself in much bigger trouble: he started talking nonsense because the autocue was malfunctioning yet again.
“While (Donald) Trump hits a new low, Joe Biden gained serious momentum today as the man himself,” he read before realizing he didn’t make sense.
The moment was reminiscent of a joke from the Anchorman films starring Will Ferrell, in which the main character has trouble with a faulty autocue.
Waleed Aly found himself in hot water during Friday night’s episode of The Project when the teleprompter fell victim to the global technical outage
Earlier on Friday, The Project’s social media team managed to find a little humor in the outage
Aly quickly realised he was fighting an impossible battle with the autocue and said, “Sorry… what am I saying?”
“Oh, this is what happens when the systems go down… there’s this weird text that appears on the… can we get a camera shot so you can see how the autocue works?” he said.
Co-host Georgie Tunny tried to intervene, but she and Aly started talking unintelligibly over each other.
“So what happened is I started reading it and the thing told me to go back to the beginning and read it again,” Aly said as the audience caught a glimpse of the quirky autocue,
“That’s right,” said Tunny.
“Here’s a tape at least where it’s understandable. Play it,” Aly said.
After the show, The Project tweeted: ‘Tonight’s The Project was brought to you by: One USB stick, One computer, One broken autocue & panic. See you Sunday.’
Channel 10 News First also saw a funny side to the technical crash and posted a strange, childish version of their normal station logo for a promo on Friday afternoon.
“Latest news: Widespread outages at Microsoft have disrupted IT systems across Australia this afternoon. Banks, airlines, police and other systems have been affected,” the company tweeted.
‘(And apparently humble admins of the social news team too. We’re doing our best here. More to come.)’
Aly explained that the autocue had gone back to the beginning and told him to read the same news item again
Channel 10 News First also showed its creativity by posting an X commentary on the crisis
Despite the chaos caused by the sudden failure of many digital systems in companies and governments, many online people found it funnier to say.
Retired basketball star Andrew Bogut thought it would be funny to post a tweet showing the harsh realities of doing business without the convenience of automatic payments.
“Mc Donald’s Berwick only accepts cash and uses an old fashioned calculator to calculate everyone’s change,” one person tweeted, along with a series of laughing emojis to which Bogut added a few of his own.
Satirical site The Chaser reported that the outage was just one of .
“The global Windows outage is making Mac users even more complacent than usual,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, another X user saw that the situation was taking an apocalyptic turn.
“The average household has about three days’ worth of food in the pantry, refrigerator, etc.,” they wrote.
“If this continues, I’d say cannibalism is coming up next Tuesday. Put it in your diary.”
Retired basketball star and another Twitter user saw the humor in people being forced to go back to basics in the hospitality industry
Traditional broadcasters 10, Nine, Seven, ABC and SBS all experienced technical issues, but online teen news service 6News was unaffected, according to a report by X Bats**t Moments in Australian Politics.
“While all of our national media outlets are down due to technical glitches, we would like to remind our international followers that one of the most trusted news organisations in Australia is literally run by a bunch of 16 year olds at times like this,” the account said.
As often happens, Wikipedia made timely changes to reflect the event after it became known that the global problems were blamed on Texas-based software security vendor CrowdStrike.
The Wikipedia article on CrowdStrike was soon updated to read: ‘On July 19, 2024, an update to CrowdStrike caused a billion computers worldwide to crash, allowing AI to take over the world, leading to the Second Dark Ages.’
And perhaps that’s better news for humanity: the edit was removed shortly after posting.
