It is a testament to how utterly extraordinary the past couple weeks have been that the Microsoft-CrowdStrike computer catastrophe was not even the second most important story in the news cycle. On Friday, July 19th, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike implemented a botched update that crashed Microsoft devices on which it was installed, ultimately inflicting the dreaded “blue screen of death” on over 8.5 million devices worldwide. Banks, businesses, hospitals, and airlines were hit particularly hard, and to this day, some of these institutions are having difficulty restoring functionality to their systems.

Video compilations such as the one below offer arresting images to give the reader a sense of just how globally catastrophic the Microsoft-CrowdStrike crash really was. It was a bit like what people imagined the Y2K scare would have been in the year 2000.

What kind of sense can we make of this? And who is at fault? Given that the botched update in question was implemented by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, a great deal of responsibility would seem to lie there. Readers might be familiar with Russiagate-stained CrowdStrike, as it was the cybersecurity firm the DNC hired to investigate the alleged “hack” of its servers leading to the exposure of highly incriminating and embarrassing emails during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The recent CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage raises additional troubling questions in light of this history, which others have explored.

For now, we would like to turn the spotlight on Microsoft. As a simple matter of security, Microsoft holds a fair share of the blame for Friday’s catastrophe. Microsoft enables Crowdstrike’s software to exist within the most sensitive layer of its devices, and one would think a tech behemoth such as Microsoft would have stop-gaps and redundancies in place to prevent such global outages from occurring in their systems. A more troubling and important aspect the Crowd-Strike-Microsoft collapse draws attention to, however, is the utter ubiquitousness of Microsoft’s systems globally. A 2021 study revealed that Microsoft’s systems have achieved a whopping 85 percent of market share in public sector software, with an especially acute concentration in the Pentagon.

Elon Musk bemoaned the effect of the Microsoft-Crowdstrike crash on the global automotive supply chain and took to X to express his displeasure with Microsoft in characteristically suggestive and memetic fashion.

… https://t.co/X9a2ghyo4P

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2024

😂 https://t.co/vvCGJqikgl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2024

Even Biden’s FTC Chair, Lina Khan, voiced concern about the vulnerabilities presented by Microsoft’s intense market concentration across systems.

1. All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers. Millions of people and businesses pay the price.

These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.

— Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) July 19, 2024

Indeed, it seems as though having a heavy concentration of Microsoft or any company’s IT products only exacerbates the problems related to our increasing inability to maintain complex systems—a dynamic that Revolver has explored extensively in relation to the airline industry.

Of course, any indictment of Microsoft would be remiss not to include its political leanings. As many of the tech world’s biggest CEOs and venture capitalists have embraced Trump, and even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed admiration for Trump’s “badass” reaction to being shot, Microsoft remains steadfastly committed to the Democrat Party, and Kamala Harris in particular. Microsoft President Brad Smith was one of Kamala’s earliest donors in the 2020 primary, and Smith hosted a fundraiser for Kamala at his home as recently as last year.

With the previously notoriously censorious Twitter now under new management, it is perhaps not such a surprise that Microsoft has emerged as the tip of the spear when it comes to politically motivated censorship. One of the more troubling examples of this is Microsoft’s longstanding relationship with a service called NewsGuard, which Revolver News was one of the very first to expose as a ludicrous censorship scam. NewsGuard is a service that charges top dollar for their opinion on which websites are deserving of censorship, which it expresses by means of “nutrition” ratings. Let’s say you’re a web platform or company of some sort, and you pay money for NewsGuard’s expertise. This means that you can set your platform or service to censor or limit access to the websites NewsGuard has determined to be politically undesirable.

In other words, companies can outsource their judgment as to what is censorship-worthy on their systems by paying NewsGuard to make those determinations for them. As it so happens, NewsGuard was a PR firm that boasted Pfizer as one of its major clients, so naturally, NewsGuard was quick to designate any news outlets that questioned Covid orthodoxy as un-nutritious. When NewsGuard employees reached out to Revolver News to chastise us for our COVID reporting, we responded by publishing a highly embarrassing piece about NewsGuard’s conflicts of interest and various advisory board members. We encourage readers to revisit the entire piece, but just for the highlights, we should note that Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director who oversaw the government’s spying program on US citizens (exposed by Snowden) and who lied about it to Congress, was a member of NewsGuard’s advisory board. Rick Stengel, Obama’s self-described “chief propagandist,” has called for the abolition of the First Amendment in order to accommodate hate speech laws.

Imagine paying money to NewsGuard so that men like this can make censorship decisions on your behalf. Who on earth would do that? Here’s where Microsoft comes in: Microsoft has been in partnership with NewsGuard since its founding in 2018, even incorporating browser extensions informed by NewsGuard’s censorship recommendations.

NewsGuard Technologies:

NewsGuard Technologies, which uses trained journalists to review and rate the credibility of thousands of news and information websites and their associated social media accounts, today announced a significant expansion and extension of its partnership with Microsoft.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will continue to sponsor NewsGuard’s news literacy program—through which more than 700 libraries provide NewsGuard to their more than seven million patrons in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy—and will expand the program into new countries, including Australia and Canada, which NewsGuard plans to serve later this year.

The agreement will also enable all users of Microsoft Edge’s desktop and mobile browser to access NewsGuard’s ratings for free, without paying the $2.95 monthly subscription fee that users of other browsers must pay. Microsoft has already integrated NewsGuard’s ratings into Microsoft Edge Mobile. In addition, Microsoft’s Bing search engine will now have access to a real-time feed of NewsGuard data.

Also, under the agreement, all other Microsoft departments are now able to use NewsGuard ratings and labels in their products and services. Projects already underway include the company’s Defending Democracy Program and teams within Microsoft Research who are working on misinformation, disinformation and health care hoaxes.

“We are delighted to be able to expand our relationship with Microsoft, which is a leader among companies in taking steps to address the unforeseen, unintended consequences of new technologies,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. “The internet has empowered people around the world with unprecedented access to information, but the internet has also made it easier than ever for misinformation to spread, including health care hoaxes about COVID-19.”

NewsGuard censorship rankings are embedded in Microsoft Teams and other programs dedicated to “education”—presumably  versions of Microsoft software that would be used in schools and, in all likelihood, the government as well. Revolver can confirm, for instance, that Revolver News is not accessible via White House and many other government computers, and this is likely due to Microsoft’s partnership with NewsGuard, which has flagged Revolver News as a website that should not be viewed.

Microsoft:

NewsGuard is a tool that shows trust ratings for over 7,500 news and information websites. It is embedded in Search Coach to provide ratings right on the students’ results page. Created by journalists, NewsGuard is a tool for assessing website credibility and transparency.

Microsoft doesn’t stop with embedding its search products with censorship software. Astonishingly, Microsoft’s commitment to Orwellian censorship extends all the way to seemingly benign programs like Microsoft Word.

Forbes:

When it comes to discussions of censorship and content moderation, most of the public and legislative focus has been on social media platforms by virtue of the heightened awareness of their moderation efforts and the considerable visibility of their decisions. It turns out, however, that even our desktop software increasingly includes “code of conduct” rules governing the kinds of acceptable speech users are permitted to create or consume through it. While little noticed, Microsoft’s terms of service actually encodes a number of acceptable content rules governing the use of its Office suite and the Microsoft Account required by default to log into Windows itself.

[…]

Yet since at least 2016, Microsoft’s agreement has included provisions banning the use of its Office 365 software to “engage in activity that is harmful to you, the Services or others” including “communicating hate speech,” as well as banning “illegal” activity. Microsoft “reserves the right to review Your Content” to investigate possible violations and any content it considers to be a violation of these rules can result in Microsoft halting the user’s access to its covered products, including Office 365 and even the Microsoft Account the user uses to log into their own desktops, laptops and tablet devices.

Note that the terms of service changes allowing Microsoft to blacklist users from using Office (including Word) for hate speech were implemented in 2016 (surely a coincidence). While Microsoft wisely has not chosen to fully enforce these terms of service, just the fact that they exist should cause concern, especially in light of how prevalent Microsoft systems are.

Microsoft is also, of course, at the forefront of AI censorship, having successfully positioned itself as the “top cop” when it comes to policing—you guessed it—disinformation in the 2024 presidential race.

Politico:

Stepping into this quagmire is Microsoft — once known as the boring old guard of Big Tech compared with newer kids on the block like Google, Facebook and, most recently, TikTok. In the era of AI, it now finds itself resurgent.

[…]

That work has become more important this year, as billions worldwide are already heading to the polls from New Delhi to Naples to Nashville. Politicians fret about an avalanche of AI-powered disinformation — from adversaries, both foreign and domestic — though such AI falsehoods’ material impact on elections has not yet been proved.

In our classic piece on “Woke AI,” we explained how the first mover advantage is everything when it comes to censorship. Indeed, the only reason search engines aren’t entirely destroyed is that they were built upon the architecture of an internet of old that was not censored. Each additional layer of the web becomes more mediated and more censored—apps are far more censored than the internet, for instance. AI represents a golden opportunity for the censors to get in on the ground floor and make sure that the technology that increasingly mediates humanity’s interface with reality reflects the censorship priorities of our ruling class.

Given Microsoft’s political leanings and foray into AI and other censorship technologies, we have grave cause for concern. At the very least, Microsoft’s track record on free speech and cybersecurity should compel us to re-evaluate if they really deserve to be the default system installed on nearly every government computer. If Trump defeats Kamala and enjoys a second term in the White House, there is no reason that White House computers should be infected with the woke virus courtesy of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard. Given her cozy relationship with Microsoft, Kamala’s election would likely spell the blue screen of death for free speech in America. Unless, of course, Microsoft’s notorious commitment to DEI policies results in them being too incompetent to censor effectively.