Elements of Friday’s global IT outage have occurred before and until more contingencies are built into networks, and organisations put better back-up plans in place, it will happen again.
Fridays outage was caused by an update that U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed to its clients early on Friday morning which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices around the world inoperable.
CrowdStrike has one of the largest shares of the highly competitive cybersecurity market that provides such tools, leading some industry analysts to question whether control over such operationally critical software should remain in the hands of just a handful of companies.
But the outage has also raised concerns among experts that many organisations are not well-prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT system, or a piece of software within it, goes down.
At the same time there are also more solvable digital disasters looming on the horizon, with perhaps the biggest global IT challenge since the Millennium Bug, the “2038 Problem”, just under 14 years away – and, this time, the world is infinitely more dependent on computers.
“It’s easy to jump at the idea that this is disastrous and therefore suggest there must be a more diverse market and, in an ideal world, that’s what we’d have,” said Ciaran Martin, former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of the country’s GCHQ intelligence agency.
“We’re actually good at managing the safety aspects of tech when it comes to cars, trains, planes, and machines. What we’re bad at is then providing services,” he added. #featured
