Glitch in the matrix

Perhaps the world’s largest IT failure or outage ever took place on Friday, impacting businesses around the world, leading to widespread flight cancellations and delays in North America and Europe, broadcasters in the UK and Australia being taken off air, British healthcare providers struggling with compromised booking systems, and disruptions in systems in many banks and financial services companies from Australia and India to Germany. Hardly any part of the world was left unscathed as even Microsoft users in Pakistan were asked by the PTA to update software from their support portal. The outage was reportedly caused by a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, impacting Microsoft systems. The fault reportedly started with a tiny bad file in an update for CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor product, leading to an error in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and causing the infamous ‘blue screen of death’ to appear on affected computers. The cybersecurity firm is now reportedly saying that all affected computers will need to be manually rebooted. The CrowdStrike CEO has dispelled speculation of a cyber-attack and said that a fix has been deployed.

The internet and tech systems are something much of the world expects to just be there. Such widespread outages of critical systems are rather unprecedented and this event shows us just how central IT has become to our lives and how centralized IT systems really are. According to a CrowdStrike promotional video released earlier this year, over half of all Fortune 500 companies use its software. A glitch in one system update involving one cybersecurity provider and one of the few widely used operating systems can cripple large chunks of the world. Crucially, this global outage took place on the supply side. The kinds of internet outages people experience in Pakistan and other countries or in the aftermath of a natural disaster show what happens when the demand side (people) are deprived of internet or IT and computer services. In such cases, life is certainly disrupted but key services do not seem to be crippled in the way they have been when the businesses and other institutions that provide vital services are the one’s taking the hit.

IT is a notoriously competitive industry with a few marquee names clustered in a handful of global tech hotspots providing services to billions. This is something that does not come about without an underlying assumption of reliability and, in all fairness, tech services might sometimes let us down but rarely do they simply not work. From the chaos and helplessness that came in the aftermath of this outage, this is evidently a scenario that the world has not thought much about let alone prepared for. Backup plans must be put in place to ensure that things can still run, if not run smoothly, should there be an outage or glitch in a large-scale IT system. Aside from emergency pre-preparation, it is also important to take a bigger look at the structure of world IT overall. Resilient or stable are not quite the words that come to mind when one thinks about how mishaps in one or two companies can cripple large portions of the world. The growth in tech has been rather unbalanced and a few companies have become as vital as public utilities – only they are utilities that serve the world and not just one country. If one decides that such accumulation of power and centrality in a few companies is actually okay, one might want to then think differently about the scrutiny and supervision such power requires.