[Not really OT] Crowdstrike Analysis: It was a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

[Walter Bright]

On 7/25/2024 12:42 PM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> The only thing left is nullability which would have protected against the 
> symptom and therefore prevented the outage.

If your null check is:

     assert(p != null);

when it trips, your program exits, causing the outage.

Assert's are for detecting programming bugs. There is no recovery from 
programming bugs, because the program has entered an unknown state and cannot be 
relied on for anything.