The Summary
- The global IT outage on Friday is a stark reminder of how a single point of failure can cause systemic disruptions to worldwide commerce.
- In addition to many major airlines being unable to clear flights for takeoff, everything from port authorities and train systems to hospitals and banks were affected.
- “This will happen and keep happening as long as everything is built around fragile supply chains where the same companies turn up time and time again,” Jennifer Cobbe, assistant professor of law and technology at the University of Cambridge, posted on X Friday.
A software failure in the web that makes up the global supply chain threatens to disrupt daily commerce for an indefinite period, showing how widespread reliance on the same system can create a worldwide crisis when that system goes down.
It was still not known Friday morning how long it would take to address the issue, which cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attributed to an improperly executed update on Microsoft systems.
Although Microsoft itself was not directly responsible for the outage, the worldwide reliance on a single common operating system and a major cybersecurity company, while useful when everything is running smoothly, creates the potential for a single point of failure to take down the entire planet, experts say.
In addition to many major airlines being unable to clear flights for takeoff, everything from port authorities and train systems to hospitals and banks were affected.
Wesley Miller, a research analyst and former Microsoft employee who writes about IT issues, said the outage shows the price of interconnectedness and the dangers of market concentration.
Not only was there an overreliance on Microsoft, he said, but Friday’s outage could also be blamed on the consolidation of vendors in the cybersecurity space. Backed by Google and one of the most valuable cybersecurity firms in the world, CrowdStrike has made a number of strategic acquisitions in recent years.
“At end of the…
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