The catastrophic worldwide outage caused by a botched software update has once again exposed the dangers of global technological dependence on a handful of players.
Last week, a flawed update sent out by the little-known security firm CrowdStrike brought airlines, TV, stations, hospitals, and many other aspects of daily life to a standstill when the update crashed Windows-based computers into a frozen state known as the “Blue Screen of Death.”
The breakdown has fueled discussions about internet giants’ power over the increasingly digital world economy, with more activity now taking place in the computing cloud, or on a few apps or platforms. Unfortunately, when those platforms have flaws, or are deliberately attacked, the world seems to collapse.
In recent months, entire healthcare systems and industries have been paralyzed after hackers infiltrated their systems, leaving consumers at their wits end and companies at a loss.
The world has seen a major shift to cloud computing, where companies use servers offered by big tech giants for their computing needs instead of their own infrastructure. Amazon, through its AWS company, is the world leader, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud.
Friday’s breakdown was caused by a malfunctioning software update fed to Microsoft Windows users by CrowdStrike, which specializes in cybersecurity for cloud-based companies.
Microsoft blamed the problems on CrowdStrike, but industry insiders warn that the issue stems from entrusting the digital world to just a few key companies, which amplifies the impact of any system failure or vulnerability. This was demonstrated by the CrowdStrike error that threatened society’s smooth functioning on a worldwide scale.
It remains to be seen what government and the private sector will do to reduce our vulnerability to such outages, which could stem from mistakes or from malicious attacks, and as we wait for them to shore up the redundancies and protections, we cannot do much but try to protect ourselves in our own way, maybe by coming up with our own personal protocols for ourselves and our households, so that even though we can enjoy the benefits of technology and digitization, we still know what do do during a worst case scenario.*
