The Worst Tech Failure in History Won’t Be the Last

We’ve all faced computer failures or annoying bugs in the systems we use. Often the best solution is just to shut down the system and reboot it. That’s usually enough to make the problem go away.

In other cases, a visit to the local computer repair shop or an online maintenance assistant (in the form of a robotic chat room) will solve the problem. In an extreme case, we decide our equipment is obsolete and we just toss it and buy a new one.

That’s at the individual level. Sometimes the systemic problem is larger, such as an airport that shuts down or a commuter railroad that can’t operate because of “computer problems.” (Train service between mid-town Manhattan and New Jersey has been horrendous this summer with tens of thousands stranded sometimes twice-a-week as faulty systems get sorted out).

What about a failure that’s even bigger than that? What about a failure that affects the entire world and shuts down air travel, rail travel, bank transactions, telecommunications and just about every major system you can think of? That’s exactly what happened about ten days ago.

A cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike pushed out a software update for the Windows operating system. CrowdStrike is the largest software provider in its field and Windows is the most widely used operating system in the world. The update crashed the Windows system globally and the result was operational chaos in multiple industries worldwide. It was the worst IT failure in history.

We all knew this could happen; the only issue was when. If you happened to be flying the day of the software crash or trying to close a business transaction with a wire transfer you may have been adversely affected. If you were on a Mac operating system or other Apple iOS, you might not even have noticed (unless you were also stuck in the airport). The bug was fixed quickly, and systems were restored within a day.

We still don’t know exactly what the problem was. Here’s what we do know: this will not be the last failure of its kind.

Extensive systems failures can be expected in the future because of the concentration of software providers and operating system developers in just a handful of firms such as Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Oracle and Apple. The lack of diversity among market participants and software algorithms guarantees large scale failures will be the norm going forward.

Individuals and businesses need to build redundancy in terms of multiple operating systems, multiple telecommunications providers and multiple cloud locations with back-up sites. That’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a good start if you want to avoid the lights out scenarios that are heading our way.

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