July 2024: Weekdays, Business Days and a Historic Outage
Friday, July 19, 2024, is the day one faulty security update stopped much of the world's work. About 8.5 million Windows machines crashed at once, thousands of flights sat grounded and hospital and bank systems dropped offline. The month around that day ran 31 days, opened on Monday, July 1 and closed on Wednesday, July 31. It stacked five Mondays, five Tuesdays and five Wednesdays across weeks 27 to 31. On paper, a tidy month. In the news, one for the record books.
The shape of July 2024
The grid tells it straight. July 2024 carried 31 days, 23 business days and just eight weekend days, with four Saturdays and four Sundays apiece. Five Mondays, five Tuesdays and five Wednesdays led the count; every other weekday stopped at four. Week numbers ran 27 to 31.
The moon turned new on Friday, July 5, first quarter on Saturday, July 13, full on Sunday, July 21 and last quarter on Sunday, July 28.
Friday, July 19: the great outage
One bad update from CrowdStrike rolled out overnight and bit hard. Windows machines worldwide showed the same failure screen. Airlines cancelled thousands of flights, broadcasters went off air and hospitals and banks scrambled onto backup systems. Analysts called it the largest IT outage in history.
A blank paper grid does not take updates, which that morning felt like a feature.
Fixes spread over the days after, and July 19 settled into the textbooks as a lesson in single points of failure.
Championship Sunday, then the Games
Sunday, July 14 stacked three finals into one afternoon. Spain beat England 2-1 in Berlin to win Euro 2024. Argentina lifted the Copa America in Miami that same night. At Wimbledon, Carlos Alcaraz and Barbora Krejcikova collected the singles trophies.
On Friday, July 26, the Paris Olympics opened with about 10,500 athletes sailing down the Seine on some 90 boats. It was the first opening ceremony ever staged outside a stadium. It rained on the whole parade, and the show went on anyway.
Cinema ran its own summer schedule. Inside Out 2 became Pixar's highest-grossing film on July 10, after passing 1 billion dollars. Deadpool & Wolverine opened on July 26 beside the ceremony and took about 438 million dollars worldwide in three days.
A month with hard edges
July carried heavy news as well. Monsoon landslides buried villages in Wayanad, India, early on Tuesday, July 30, and more than 300 people died. Days earlier, on Wednesday, July 24, a wildfire swept into Jasper, Alberta, and destroyed about a third of its structures. Roughly 25,000 people fled the national park.
The month also posted, at the time, the hottest global average day ever measured: 17.16 degrees Celsius on Monday, July 22.
The July 2024 grid still prints clean, no restart required. Paper keeps excellent uptime.