Channel 10’s The Project managed to find the funny side of Microsoft’s global outage, but the joke backfired when the autocue failed and presenter Waleed Aly was left speechless.
With the broadcaster among many businesses and government agencies thrown into chaos by the outage that hit Australia around 3pm on Friday, The Project ran a cheeky promo for X that afternoon suggesting they might have to put a test pattern on air.
“Tonight’s show is going to be great,” the tweet read.
When the 6:30pm broadcast time came around, it was the live panel that appeared on the screens instead of the static test image, but it soon became clear that all was not well.
As the panel was discussing the massive technological failure that caused chaos around the world, host Waleed Aly suddenly stopped speaking because the audio system had a momentary glitch. “I thought that was the end of it,” he said.
However, when Aly began to give a summary of the day’s news, starting with a summary of the US presidential election, she soon encountered much more serious problems: she was talking nonsense because the autocue was not working properly again.
“While (Donald) Trump is hitting a new low, Joe Biden gained major momentum today as the man himself,” she read before realizing it made no sense.
The moment echoed a running gag in the Anchorman films starring Will Ferrell in which the title character struggles with a malfunctioning teleprompter.
Waleed Aly ran into trouble on Friday night’s episode of The Project when the autocue fell victim to the global technological disruption.
Earlier on Friday, The Project’s social media team managed to find some cheeky humor in the outage.
Aly soon realized she was fighting an unwinnable battle with the autocue and said, “I’m sorry… what am I saying?”
“Oh, this is what happens when systems fail… strange text appears on the… can we take a picture of the camera so you can see how the autocue works?” he said.
Co-host Georgie Tunny attempted to intervene, but she and Aly ended up speaking incomprehensibly over each other.
“What happened was I started reading it and the thing told me to go back to the beginning and read it again,” Aly said as the audience got a sneak peek of the wayward autocue.
“That’s right,” Tunny said.
“Anyway, here’s a tape that will make sense of all this: record it,” Aly said.
After the show, The Project tweeted: ‘Tonight’s show was brought to you by: a USB stick, a computer, a broken autocue, and panic. See you on Sunday.’
Channel 10 News First also found a funny side to the tech crisis by posting a childish and bizarre version of its station’s usual logo for a promotion Friday afternoon.
“Breaking news: Widespread Microsoft service outages have caused computer systems across Australia to go haywire this afternoon, with banks, airlines, police and other systems reported to be affected,” he tweeted.
(And the humble admins of the social news team too, obviously. We’re doing the best we can. There will be more.)
Aly explained that the autocue had returned to the beginning and was telling her to read the same news again.
Channel 10 News First also showed its creativity by making a comment X about the crisis.
Despite the chaos created by the sudden emergence of many digital business and government systems, many online found what was said to be funnier.
Retired basketball star Andrew Bogut found joy in a tweet that showed the harsh reality of doing business without the conveniences of self-checkout.
“Mc Donald’s Berwick only accepts cash and uses an old calculator to calculate everyone’s change,” one person tweeted with several laughing emojis to which Bogut added a few of his own.
Satirical newspaper The Chaser commented on the outage which affected only one of the .
“The global outage of Windows has left Mac users even more dissatisfied than usual,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, another X user saw things 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 think there will be cannibalism next Tuesday. Mark it on your calendar.”
A retired basketball star and another Twitter user saw the funny side of people being forced to go back to basics in hospitality.
As traditional broadcasters 10, Nine, Seven, ABC and SBS are experiencing technical difficulties, the X Bats**t Moments in Australian Politics account noted that teen-run online news service 6News was unaffected.
“As all of our national media outlets collapse due to technological outages, we once again remind our international followers that one of the most trusted media outlets in Australia during times like this is literally run by a bunch of 16-year-olds,” the account posted.
As is often the case, Wikipedia received some timely edits to reflect the event after it was revealed that the global troubles could be traced back to Texas-based software security vendor CrowdStrike.
The Wikipedia entry on CrowdStrike was soon updated with the edit stating that “On July 19, 2024, a CrowdStrike update crashed 1 billion computers worldwide and allowed AI to take over the world, leading to the Second Dark Age.”
In perhaps better news for humanity, the edit was removed shortly after being posted.