My pickup truck was due for its yearly inspection, so I drove to Ormsbee's Garage in Mill River on Monday July 22. No dice. The “system” was down from a global system outage that had occurred three days earlier.

    The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles reported that the outage that had knocked out systems affecting airlines, hospitals, and businesses across the world was still affecting its computers. So a mechanic in isolated Mill River could not conduct an annual inspection.

    The massive disruption originated with CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, and that the outage was not caused by a security incident or cyberattack. Microsoft estimated that the outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices, which is less than 1 percent of all Windows machines, but “the broad economic and societal impacts ref lect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”

    So I had to make a second trip to Mill River. My pickup passed its tests. All systems were go.