Yesterday the CrowdStrike update disable thousands of servers and clients all across the world. The affected systems crashed when booting. A first analysis by Zach Vorhies (careful, the link goes to the right-wing social media network X) has some not very surprising news about the cause of the problem. Apparently, the system driver from CrowdStrike hit a null pointer access violation. Of course, people immediately started bashing C++, but this is too shallow. There are different layers where code is executed. The user space is usually a safe ground where you can use standard techniques of catching errors. Even a crash might be safer for user space applications than continuing and doing more harm. Once your code runs as a system driver, then you are part of the operating system and have to observe a couple of constraints. OS code can’t just exit or crash (even exception without the catch{} code count as a crash). So having a null situation in mission-critical code is something which should never happen. This should have been caught in the testing phase. Furthermore, Modern C++ has no use for null pointers. You must use smart pointers, and by doing that, you don’t need to handle null pointers. There is nothing more to it.
You cannot ignore certain error conditions when running within the operating system. Memory allocation, I/O errors, and everything concerning memory operations is critical. There must be checks in place, and there is no excuse for omitting these checks.