In June 2017, Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, was hit by NotPetya. The malware spread through their unpatched Windows network and destroyed 45,000 PCs and 4,000 servers across 130 countries. Maersk had to rebuild its entire IT infrastructure from scratch, at a cost of roughly $300 million.1 Then in December 2022, a winter storm hit the US. Every major airline recovered within days, except Southwest, whose legacy crew scheduling system couldn't reassign pilots and flight attendants fast enough. The result: 16,900 cancelled flights, two million stranded passengers, and a $140 million DOT fine.2
Both companies were brought down not by the external event itself, but by software that couldn't cope with it.
1 Andy Greenberg, Wired, 2018
2 DOT Consent Order, December 2023