A massive global technology outage knocked scores of industries offline earlier today, taking down airlines, medical services, media outlets and banks around the world. The outage began when CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, pushed a software update that caused machines running Microsoft Windows to crash. (AP)
Our Take
A massive outage like this serves as yet another reminder of the degree to which businesses and societies around the world are now tethered to the internet and digital technology. Given that neither is ever fail-safe, an outage like this one can bring entire industries to a standstill. So while the digital revolution has at this point become mundane and invisible, technological failure still has a dramatic and visible effect.
And although the cause of the outage in this case was a software update gone wrong, it still shows the level of disruption that a massive cyberattack on critical infrastructure—ironically, precisely what CrowdStrike protects against—could cause. Ransomware attacks on the public sector are already a major issue, even if the damage has been relatively limited in all but a few cases. Still, imagining the impact of a similar disruption to election infrastructure, which in the U.S. and many other countries relies on digital technology for everything from electronic voting machines to ballot count submissions, makes the vulnerability of these systems a major concern.