When will businesses, organizations and governments learn that running anything on Windows is asking for trouble? The UK’s Department of Work and Pensions suffered a nearly complete failure of 80% of its computer systems on Monday, and only today have managed to get most everything back to normal and begin clearing the backlog of 60,000 pension claims which came in this week.

BBC News coverage — Guardian coverage — The Register coverage

The source of the problem? An upgrade of seven PCs to Windows XP got out of hand and brought down 80,000 computers. This without malicious activity, hackers, viruses, etc.

Texas-based EDS is responsible for upgrading and maintaining many UK government computer systems, though the Department of Inland Revenue told them to get stuffed after seeing their shoddy work at the Child Support Agency. EDS had £12.1m withheld on the CSA contract.

The moral? Windows itself is dangerous and should be relegated to unimportant tasks such as playing games, where if it crashes, you don’t risk losing your pension cheque or having your plane crash. In that case, rock-solid Unix systems were replaced with Windows, and the end result was five near-misses. The “solution”? Reboot Windows once every 30 days. That’s not good enough. The air traffic control system should not require a reboot once a month! It didn’t when it ran on Unix. When I fly I’m much more frightened of the Windows computers in the background than of terrorists, and with good reason. Windows nearly killed thousands of people. It’s only a matter of time…