How an Unheard Company Shut Down the Whole World
The ubiquity of technology in our modern society has profoundly intensified our dependency on technology. Imagining our life without technology has become impossible as every space of our daily routines - from our bedrooms to public venues - is operated by modern technology. Such overdominance of technology and our adoption of its prevalence have led us to not cast doubt on the risks that can be triggered by our overdependence on computers. Crowdstrike IT outage, which recently caused millions worldwide to miss flights, struggle with failed transactions at banks, and leave hundreds of thousands of Windows operating computers to fail at a global scale, exemplifies the aftermaths of our modern technology’s vulnerabilities. This recent outage brings serious discussion and light into the vulnerability of our modern-day systems as one miniscule error has demonstrated to be capable of creating a global chaos. Subsequently, evaluating the extent of our reliance on technology and discussing what needs to be done such vulnerable faults in our technology are inevitable.
To understand what we can do to prevent such a large fault in our system, we must understand what happened in the first place. Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company that essentially operates the platform which Microsoft Windows operates on for certain companies, designed to protect security breaches and detect hacks. On July 19, 2024 Crowdstrike released a faulty update running on Windows PCs that caused an out-of-bounds error on Windows clients that resulted in an error regarding the page. All Windows devices subsequently became stuck on a blue screen of death in which computers would constantly error upon activation or into recovery mode. Most personal computers were not affected as Crowdstrike is mainly used for companies; what this error impacted were global companies such as Google, Meta, airlines, hospitals, and banks, all of which experienced significant losses caused by delays of the system. Microsoft promptly took action to remediate the problems; however, given the immense volume of systems most businesses run, strenuous amounts of effort and time were needed for full recovery.
To prevent any disruptions in the future, technology companies need to make a collective effort to keep potential breaches and vulnerabilities of systems transparent. Knowing the risks of employing platforms such as Falcon will lead to better awareness and preparation in the event of an accidental outage. One of the reasons that this outage became a global chaos is the universal dependence on Windows. While those using Windows were impacted by the outage, non-Windows users did not. For example, China, which uses self-sufficient IT programs, was not as affected by the outage as much as other countries. Hence, decentralizing systems is another solution as most systems around the world use Windows; employing other platforms such as Linux or heterogeneous systems could prevent mass outages.
