CrowdStrike Outage: Global Tech Chaos Ensues
Faulty update paralyzes worldwide systems
Total reading time around 4 minutes.
Welcome to Visually AI!
CrowdStrike Outage
(Not AI news, but impacted many of us.)
The first emails I read at my job this morning were about the “IT Services Issues” caused by the global CrowdStrike Outage.
What happened?
CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity company, experienced a global outage on July 19, 2024, due to a faulty software update that affected Microsoft Windows systems worldwide.
The incident caused widespread disruptions across various sectors, including airlines, banks, healthcare, and government services, leading to flight delays, payment issues, and system failures.
While CrowdStrike has identified and implemented a solution, the outage highlights the vulnerability of interconnected digital infrastructure and the far-reaching consequences of software glitches in our increasingly tech-dependent world.
Key details:
• Caused by a defective update to CrowdStrike's Falcon Cloud Security software
• Affected Windows-based devices, resulting in blue screen errors
• Impacted critical services in multiple countries
• Not a cyberattack, but a technical malfunction
🔮AI News This Week
GPT-4o mini
OpenAI announced its latest model, GPT-4o mini.
GPT-4o mini stands out by offering superior performance in reasoning, math, and coding tasks compared to other small models like Gemini Flash and Claude Haiku.
It boasts a context window of 128K tokens, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and is optimized for handling large volumes of context or parallelizing multiple model calls, making it ideal for complex applications such as customer support chatbots and data extraction.
Additionally, GPT-4o mini is built with enhanced safety features, including resistance to jailbreaks and prompt injections, ensuring reliable and secure use in diverse applications.
Google Vids
Google Vids is a new AI-powered video creation tool within Google Workspace that allows users to create professional-looking videos using text prompts, templates, and stock media. This is not Google Veo, the Sora-like video generator.
The tool offers features such as scene customization, media addition, voiceover recording, and timing adjustments, making it suitable for various applications including marketing, training, and internal communications.
Currently available to select Workspace Labs participants, Google Vids is gradually rolling out, and interested users can sign up for the invite-only Google Workspace Labs program to potentially gain access to this and other new AI features.
I made this video in about 10 minutes, and you can see my workflow in the next video below:
This is my workflow:
📸AI Snapshots
Mistral AI introduced Mistral NeMo - a state-of-the-art 12B model with a 128k context length, designed for advanced reasoning, multilingual applications, and efficient coding, built in collaboration with NVIDIA.
Microsoft Designer mobile app is available on iOS and Android devices, for photo editing, social media posts, greeting cards, and more.
Actor Keanu Reeves co-authored a sci-fi novel titled, “The Book of Elsewhere”, with writer China Mieville. The story is based on the “John Wick” actor’s BRZRKR comics about an 80,000 year-old immortal warrior named B. The book’s release date is set for July 23, 2024.
🛠️ This Week’s AI Tools
Pico: AI text-to-app platform to build web apps powered by GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and other AI models. (link)
TalkTastic: Elevate your voice with context-aware, personalized dictation that seamlessly integrates with your Mac, transforming your speech into polished text across any app. (link)
Miro Intelligent Canvas: AI-powered platform that helps teams ideate, iterate, and deliver faster with features like AI sidekicks, intelligent widgets, and customizable templates. (link)
Dream Machine Prompt Guide: Luma AI published a comprehensive prompt guide with tips for image to video and text to video, with several example prompts. (link)
PicAisso: Curated list of AI design tools, image / video / music generators, and more from
. Note: She was my inspiration for learning to use AI image tools two years ago! (link)Microlaunch: Platform that helps makers & creators get feedback & exposure for new product launches, over a monthly challenge, and ideally first sales. (link)
AuraFlow w/ VLM Captioner: Hugging Face Space demo built by Nicolas Poussin lets you create long prompts from images or enhance your short prompts with prompt enhancer. (link)
💻Visually AI on YouTube
On this week’s episode of Under the Hood, a collaboration with my good friend, Miguel (aka AP on 𝕏), we’ll show you how to build or remix an interactive app with Claude Artifacts step-by-step:
Under the Hood | Episode 3: Building apps with Claude in minutes
🖼️ Image Prompts
Prompt: Split-level shot of iceberg, revealing massive underwater structure beneath surface
Prompt: Extreme long exposure of starry night sky, Milky Way arching over silhouetted mountains
🎞️ Video Prompt
Prompt: A book whose pages flip to reveal animated, glitchy scenes instead of text. Each page turn causes a cascade of digital artifacts that form the next scene.
Note: You can customize this prompt by removing the ‘glitchy scenes’ and ‘digital artifacts’, to replace with “anime”, “butterflies”, “stars”, etc.
I used ElevenLabs Video to Sound app to match sound effects.
Thanks for reading, and have a creative week!
The page turn animation was really cool, was not expecting that
Thanks for sharing my directory, Heather.💜