The global tech outage that hit Kiama and the rest of the world may have caused a few choice words in the office, but it also showed the best in teamwork.

With only an hour to go before I was due to hit the airwaves on a regional radio station, the show was looking good. The people we wanted to interview were locked in, the scripts were written, and the remaining time could be used to craft our audio.

The grey skies and sudden downpour of rain should have raised my suspicion that despite being prepared, it was about to go downhill.

Just as the clock hit three, when I was in the middle of editing audio, the laptop crashed and I unleashed an expletive under my breath. Thinking that I had asked the computer to work too hard, I went about restarting it when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that my producer’s computer had the old Microsoft Windows Blue Screen of Death.

It was in those minutes that I heard a collective surprise from other colleagues as their computers all suffered the same fate. It was a domino effect, as each computer crashed.

At this stage of the afternoon no one had any idea that it was a software update pushed through by a cyber security company in the US that had caused the issue. Instead our minds suddenly jumped to the conclusion that we were hacked.

Despite the uncertainty, and with the bare basic of systems in operation, the team made a decision that the show must go on.

While I familiarised myself with the workings of a CD player, a skill that I hadn’t lost, and pawed through a somewhat vintage collection of CDs, with obscure country artists, the rest of my team were madly writing scripts by hand as we no longer had access to our systems.

As the hour of the broadcast drew closer, I was so humbled to see everyone working together in a situation no one had experienced before; no one complaining about the massive task at hand; all working towards a common goal.

The outage may have shown the worst in technology when it fails, but it also showed the best in people when faced with a challenge, and at the end of the day, I am so proud to have been able to share the moment with a group of hardworking and dedicated individuals.

This is only one story from the global tech outage, and across Kiama, there are many businesses and offices that experienced the collapse of their windows computer. What was your experience? The Bugle Newspaper wants to hear your story.