Computer users recently experienced what could be described as an important warning for the digital world. For some, it manifested in the form of a blue screen, also known as Blue Screen of Death, which stopped working. For others, it was cancelled flights and the inability to access important information to carry out work.
Essentially, the global community experienced what it feels like when systems fail. What happened and what can we learn from the failure of systems?
A cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, a Texas company, that specialises in protecting corporate clients from cyberthreats pushed out an automatic update to its security software on its clients’ machines.
Unfortunately, the update inadvertently contained a bug that forced machines that received it to crash, resulting in the Blue Screen of Death, the screen that appears on a Windows PC when there has been a critical error in the software. Due to this bug and its resulting system crashes, services that rely on these computers went down across the world.
This incident perfectly illustrated what happens when society places its reliance on technology for its operations. It also illustrated the extent to which most businesses rely on dominant technology companies for their functions. This outage was not the result of a flaw in Windows itself. Rather, it was a flaw with Windows security software provided by CrowdStrike.
Because of this, only PCs running the impacted CrowdStrike software were affected – not every Windows PC across the world.
CrowdStrike’s services are used by scores of Fortune 500 companies. These companies will probably evaluate their use of CrowdStrike – a company founded in 2011 – which has since grown and has 8 000 employees. If lawmakers are paying attention will they be emboldened to discourage monopolies?
The recent technology outage should inspire society to reflect on the use of technology, and how it is used.
In most cases, when new technology is used, very few factor in the possibility of outages. As we adopt technology for daily functions, there’s a need to also enable the ability to function manually without impacting productivity when systems fail.
More importantly, there’s a need to assess the impact of potential technology outages. Such an assessment process should pay attention to over-reliance on dominant companies. The recent incident has shown that over-reliance on a single entity can negatively impact society. This is more important now as we adopt artificial intelligences (AI).
It would be a great error for most companies to rely heavily on dominant AI companies. The effects of reliance on a dominant AI company could be disastrous at a point at which AI is highly adopted. The more connected we are the more danger we are likely to experience when something goes wrong. None of this should hamper innovation, however, there’s a need to begin a process of introducing responsible innovation.
Now more than ever we should ask ourselves, what could go wrong? Failure to anticipate future negative consequences of using technology will cost us dearly. So far we have not seen much damage with the CrowdStrike incident, however, in future technology outages may affect our very lives. We should adopt future technology with caution and responsibly.
Wesley Diphoko is a technology analyst. He has been operating at the intersection of technology and media as the editor of FastCompany (SA) magazine. You can follow him on X via: @WesleyDiphoko
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