LARGEST IT OUTAGE IN HISTORY: Consequences of Technological Dependence
Tech Services DOWN Worldwide, Tech Dependence UP
Should readers count themselves as one of the billions of people around the world who not only declare technology’s wondrous contributions to culture but who are also seemingly incapable of envisaging technology’s Herculean resister of imperfections, todays lesson may be an especially useful one to ascertain.
This morning, a monstrous IT outage sparked disarray for a plethora of businesses around the world.
According to reports, doctors’ offices, media outlets, companies and financial services were disrupted, as were Microsoft cloud services and air travel.
In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration said that the airlines American, Delta, United and Allegiant were all grounded.
Railways, television stations and airlines in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe were also affected.
“Health systems around the world cancelled procedures and resorted to using handwritten records in the wake of a global digital outage that roiled vital resources from air travel to emergency services,” Bloomberg reported.
The cause of the world’s largest IT blackout, apparently, was nothing more than a Windows software update initiated by cyber firm CrowdStrike.
Though it is often unremarkable that the cybersecurity giant regularly pushes anti-virus updates, it seems its latest dispatch carried the notable effect of plunging much of the world back to a pre-tech past.
Earlier in the day, CrowdStrike told NBC that they experienced a major disruption following an issue with its latest Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring product’s tech update. The company’s CEO George Kurtz said that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
Bloomberg further reported that, “The cyber fiasco, the result of a flawed CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. software update that took down Microsoft Corp. systems, ripped through airports, clinics and financial networks worldwide in a stark reminder of universal dependence on properly functioning software. Hospitals from New York to London to Paris suffered under the strain.”
As noted by Simon Pardo, Computer Care’s director of technology, to The Express, "An IT failure double whammy has brought the world to its knees this morning, and the ongoing chaos will be costing businesses billions of pounds every hour. Two separate problems have struck at the same time, with issues hitting Microsoft’s 365 services, and an update from anti-malware product Crowdstrike that is pushing computers into a blue screen of death.”
He also said that, “Updates should always be thoroughly tested before they are pushed out to users, and it’s hard to know whether this is human error or a failure of process."
While acknowledging that Microsoft services were slowly returning online, he suggested that the dilemma could leave businesses facing weeks of disruption.
“Unfortunately, there is not a huge amount you can do if your computer has the blue screen of death,” he said, adding, “Computer users will need to wait for their IT team to resolve the issue, and many people may need to work from their phone or use a pen and paper in the meantime.” He went on to say that, “This is a wake-up call for all the companies that have been floored by this attack. Organizations need to urgently review their disaster recovery plans to make sure they can deal with such problems."
Richard Stiennon, a cybersecurity industry analyst who has tracked the cybersecurity industry for 24 years, told the Associated Press that Crowdstrike made a historic mistake, adding that, “This is easily the worst faux pas, technical faux pas or glitch of any security software provider ever.”
According to Farah Jameel, a doctor at the central London Museum Practice, to Bloomberg, “I still can’t access blood tests, I can’t access imaging, I can’t access their past records so I can’t really make a comprehensive plan at the moment.”
Bloomberg also mentioned a London general practitioner and former medical director of primary care for NHS England, who said that some doctors had to deal with the great misfortune of having to conduct face-to-face triage, as well as filling in handwritten notes and prescriptions, a peculiar yet burdensome misfortune in a hyper-technological world.
One person whose flight was delayed at Kansas City International Airport was reported by the AP as saying that, “No use getting upset. It’s not anything we can control.”
It’s not anything we can control, indeed.
This is because, in a technology-fueled existence, it is a culture’s technology that maintains control, and should error-prone technology fail, as it so often does, then humans held under technology’s authority inevitably lose control.
This fact can easily be observed by those accustomed to pondering the computer’s ascendancy in culture.
The end result is that such mistakes can effectively be blamed on technology and, in this way, humans are relieved from the responsibility and accountability of their errors.
The kind of matters, such as what we have seen play out today, reflect a “profound shift in perception about the relationship of computers to humans,” remarked author Neil Postman, in his book Technopoly. “If computers can become ill, then they can become healthy. Once healthy, they can think clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has a will, has intentions, has reasons- which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the computer’s decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence ‘We use the computer to calculate’ comes to mean ‘The computer calculates.’ If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because ‘the computers are down.’ The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an ‘agentic shift,’ a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control . . . Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority.”1
And so, not only does personal responsibility come to be transferred through computer technology (it was not us who caused the largest IT glitch in history, it was the computer, the software update, the technology . . .), as this morning’s events have confirmed, but it also happens to bear the consequence of shackling culture to its efficiency, absent of which a culture is unable to operate, as today’s events have also corroborated.
In other words (or so a highly-technological culture might collectively proclaim): without our requisite and so-called efficient technologies, we are completely disarmed and broken.
The point in all this, of course, is to underline the great deal of dependence our culture has on software supplied by a small handful of providers.
As reported by the Associated Press, one 73-year-old man was expecting open heart surgery today, though his appointment had to be cancelled as a result of the global tech outage.
One person detailed in the article was observant enough to summarize matters this way: “It does really make you just realize how much we rely on technology and how scary it is.”
My hope is that, in the face of technology’s clearly demonstrated frailty, some might come to perceive the true fragility of our tech-reliant world, and that our culture might somehow escape the reality of witnessing a tech collapse that could send our society back to the dark ages.
Or, at the very least, comprehend the penalties involved in overly-trusting the efficiency of our data-driven culture.
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology, P. 114-115