I dunno how blind I have to be to miss this for all this time, but the air vents they have on the pit wall are the same air vents you get on a Mercedes-Benz.
Oh, if you worked at a company that uses them (which is a lot of companies), you'd definitely be familiar with them as they hog up a ton of fucking CPU/disk. I basically had an entire CPU core dedicated to running their bullshit.
Something I heard about recently is that it's unnervingly common for the stock prices of unknown but really important companies like these to shoot up following an outage because it reveals to stock investors how mich of a monopoly it has in an area.
Are you not in the US? Equifax is a credit bureau and if you've never heard of them, you never needed credit or you're not from the US.
The other three, I've only heard of Ashley Madison because they had a very aggressive ad campaign before ad blockers became ubiquitous. One could say it was ads like theirs that made ad blocking a requirement.
When I heard "CrowdStrike" took down operating systems everywhere, I thought it was the name of a virus or a group of hackers. I'm not the only one hearing an inherent villainy in that name, right?