One of the most disturbing things about Friday’s devastating global outage of IT systems is how routine such ruinous events have become.
In the last few years, similar glitches from companies like Amazon.com have temporarily shut down systems across the globe, and this latest issue comes as a result of a botched software update from cyber security firm CrowdStrike Holdings, whose link to mega customer Microsoft has led to worldwide problems — including chaos in airports, stock exchanges and hospitals, though a fix has now been deployed.
This time the scale is unprecedented. That should spur Microsoft and other IT firms to do more than simply administer a band-aid. Policy makers could address the world’s over-reliance on just three cloud providers too. Today’s reality, where a single bug can harm millions of people at once, doesn’t have to be the status quo.