The IT outage that crippled the world last week could have been a whole lot worse, would you believe?
On Friday afternoon (Sydney time) airlines, banks and retailers were experiencing system failures and the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death) and were simply unable to do business.
It turns out, CrowdStrike a security company that 99 per of the world’s customers had never heard about until that fateful day, had uploaded an erroneous update that didn’t agree with the system which sent it into meltdown.
Ironically, the system behaved precisely as it was designed to do. When it detected an issue, it shut down to protect itself.
It was one line of code that stopped the world.
But it’s hard to believe that this issue, according to Microsoft, who’s Azure cloud platform suffered the outage, only affected 1 per cent of all Windows machines around the world or 8.5 million Windows devices.
It just so happened that these machines were in the front line when checking people in, when people were trying to purchase something with their credit card or withdraw money from their bank or ATM.
There are countless other businesses that you wouldn’t have heard from who also suffered from the outage because they couldn’t connect to the Microsoft cloud platform used by 85 per cent of the world’s computers.
Luckily there were backup systems for mission critical and life and death situations like the military, emergency services and hospitals.
Others are calling for airlines and banks to also have a backup system.
But that would be like having a backup car in case your regular car didn’t start.
This system is robust and usually bulletproof so the outage we experienced the other day, undoubtedly the biggest in history, is an extremely rare occurrence.
There may be some merit to the argument of having a smaller standby system that can handle things while the other system is down and perhaps running on the Mac or Linux platform.
For companies already using Mac and Linux it was business as usual last week while the rest of the world came to a standstill.
Despite the problem originating with independent cyber security company CrowdStrike, a $100billion US company, Microsoft says it is supporting customers impacted using its ecosystem.
David Weston, Microsoft’s Vice President, Enterprise and OS security said: “Since this event began, we’ve maintained ongoing communication with our customers, CrowdStrike and external developers to collect information and expedite solutions.
“We recognize the disruption this problem has caused for businesses and in the daily routines of many individuals.
“Our focus is providing customers with technical guidance and support to safely bring disrupted systems back online.”
Days later IT managers around the world are still cleaning up the mess and the backlog resulting from the outage.
This whole incident demonstrates the world’s reliability on technology, and particularly the Microsoft cloud platform.
The same systems that provide the speed and convenience we take for granted in our day-to-day lives is the same system that can throw our lives into turmoil when it’s not working.
Thankfully those days are a rarity.
But still, it wouldn’t hurt to have some cash on hand just in case.
