Saturday Morning

Saturday Morning with Colin Peacock in the hot seat this week

 

8:10-9:00 Special coverage of Crowdstrike IT outage

Global services are slowly recovering from a crippling software update failure.

Airlines, healthcare, shipping and finance were among the sectors affected by the faulty download by cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which has more than 20-thousand clients worldwide.

Companies are now dealing with backlogs of delayed and canceled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that could take days to resolve.

 

8:15 Dan Ives: What is Crowdstrike?

The cybersecurity company was founded in 2011, with goals to safeguard the world's largest companies and their hardware from cyber threats.

The company specialises in endpoint security protection. Basically, it stops malicious software or files from infiltrating computer networks.  It also protects the servers companies store data on, which is increasingly happening through the cloud.

They're a highly trusted company, to the extent  the US Democratic National Committee called them in 2016 to investigate a breach of their computer network.

Dan Ives is with Wedbush Securities.

8:20: How has the outage affected supermarkets?

The IT outage affected supermarkets around the country yesterday.

Some Woolworth stores shut as people were unable to buy things at checkouts or order items online.

Woolworths NZ says all its stores have reopened this morning but some checkouts will still be affected.

Jason Stockwill is Woolworths New Zealand's director of stores.

8:25 Retail NZ

As retailers start to open this morning we'll get a better idea of any lasting impacts of the Crowdstrike outage.

Carolyn Young is the Chief Executive of Retail NZ

8:35 Acting PM David Seymour: outage's effect on government systems

The acting Prime Minister, David Seymour, has been briefed by officials throughout the evening on the outage, with initial concerns over government systems in particular.

8:40 Live from Crowdstrike HQ

The IT company at the centre of this storm, Crowdstrike, has their headquarters in Austin, Texas.

RNZ correspondent Toni Waterman is outside Crowdstrike's headquarters.

8:45  How concerned are Olympic organisers?

It's a week out from the Paris Olympics. Everything is back up and running at the Olympic village and venues, but France has been particularly worried about this outage. The BBC's Hugh Schofield reports.

8:50 Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell

New Zealand's health system was also affected last night.  RNZ understands an integral part of the medical system was down.

 

9:05 Dr Moriba Jah: the increasing threat of space junk

Renowned space environmentalist and astrodynamicist specialising in space object detection and identification, Dr Moriba Jah believes it's only a matter of time before someone is killed by falling space debris. Currently there are an estimated 27,000 objects bigger than a softball hurtling around the Earth's orbit, not to mention the millions of smaller fragments. And these numbers are only set to grow with 24,000 satellites set to launch in the next 10 years.

Dr Jah is also the chief scientist for Privateer, a start-up co-founded by Apple's Steve Wozniak aiming to enable sustainable growth for the space sector. The company has mapped our crowded skies and used that data to create Wayfinder - a space junk tracker application available to the public.

9:25 Kevin Day: football didn't come home, again

British writer, comedian and football fan Kevin Day joins Colin to talk about the reaction in England of football not coming home.

Almost thirty years ago the song Three Lions took off.  Its refrain "football's coming home"  was been sung lustily by fans ever since - only to come up short time and again.

9:45 Liam Dann: are interest rates falling fast enough to save small businesses?

New Zealand Herald business editor-at-large Liam Dann says interest rates are picked to fall, but before then small and medium businesses will continue to feel the pinch.

10:05 Åsne Seierstad: The Afghans

Award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad, studied life in Afghanistan before and after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, documenting it in her book The Bookseller of Kabul.  Twenty years later, with the Taliban back in power, Seierstad shares the story of her return to Afghanistan to explore life under the current regime through three individuals and their families in her latest book The Afghans.

10:35 How to be a Citizen - breaking rules to fix them

Societies have rules to stop them from descending into chaos - at least that's what Constitutional scholar Cindy Skach used to believe. Her career was spent advising governments and writing constitutions to help fix society in some of the most fractured, war-torn corners of the world. That was until 2009, when she survived a missile attack while in Iraq helping to revise the constitution - an event that changed her thinking on how societies function.

In her book How to Be a Citizen, Skach calls to move beyond constitutions, inviting us to see society not as something imposed by law, but rather something we create together.

11:05 Lucia Osborne-Crowley: Lasting Harm

The case of billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein shocked and captured the attention of the world. Ghislaine Maxwell is the British socialite jailed for procuring young girls for Epstein.  Her trial was meticulously covered by journalist and legal affairs correspondent Lucia Osborne-Crowley, one of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom every day.

Lucia is an award-winning writer and journalist, her book The Lasting Harm: Witnessing The Trial Of Ghislaine Maxwell follows the 2021 Maxwell trial with a focus on the survivors at the centre of this case.

11:40 Larry Killip: an under-the-radar icon of NZ music history

Lynfield-based Larry Killip describes himself as "possibly the most famous person that you have never heard of". 

With a musical career stretching back to the mid-60s, Killip's first band The Zarks was formed with a few high school buddies. Since then he's continued to write and perform in various iterations, but the work most people would be familiar with is the hundreds of jingles Killip has written - for everything from Columbine stockings to Skyline Gottages.

He joins Colin Peacock to reflect on his unusual career, his work with indie pop darlings The Beths, and his ever-growing collection of vintage gear and ephemera.

Books featured on today's show:

The Lasting Harm: Witnessing The Trial Of Ghislaine Maxwell 
By Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Published by Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781761066566

The Afghans
By Åsne Seierstad
Published by Virago
ISBN: 9781408717943

How to Be a Citizen
By C.L. Skach
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing 
ISBN: 9781526655202