A global tech outage exposes the heavy reliance on a few tech companies, impacting businesses worldwide
Friday’s global technology outage highlights the world’s heavy dependence on a few tech companies, according to Alex Hamerstone, advisory solutions director at Ohio-based TrustedSec.
“Everything these days is dependent on computer systems, and when they’re not available, companies just can’t operate,” Hamerstone said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg last Friday morning.
CrowdStrike, the company at the centre of the outage, reported that it had deployed a software fix and was working to restore systems for its customers. However, the impacts, including delays and closures, are expected to persist throughout the day and beyond.
The Texas-based cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, provides antivirus and protective software for Microsoft Windows systems. An overnight software update from the company contained a defect, which crippled Windows systems and took them offline.
“The update apparently had some issues which caused the Microsoft servers and endpoints to have significant problems and not be able to run,” explained Hamerstone. “When computer systems are down, your company is generally down as well.”
CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, confirmed in a social media post on Friday that the incident was not a cyber-attack and assured customers they remain “fully protected.”
Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can…
Hamerstone noted that resolving such issues requires manually rebooting systems, which is time-consuming due to the prevalence of off-site data centres and remote employees.
“It’s not as simple as IT staff just walking around and restarting these systems. It can be much more difficult and involved, and it just takes time,” he said.
He suggested that more thorough testing of software updates before release could help prevent future outages. “The big story here is how dependent the world has become on a very small number of organizations,” Hamerstone said.
“One company having an issue can have wide-ranging effects across various industries worldwide.”
