In what may go down as the most spectacular IT meltdown the world has ever seen, a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed countless Microsoft Windows computer systems all over the world, idling airlines, banks, hospitals and even the London Stock Exchange. For several hours, bankers in Hong Kong, doctors in the UK and emergency personnel in New Hampshire found themselves locked out of programs critical to keeping their operations afloat. There are precedents for such outages. In 2017, a series of errors within Amazon’s cloud service affected the operation of tens of thousands of websites. In 2021, issues at content delivery network Fastly took out several media networks. Disruptions also incapacitated Amazon’s AWS cloud service. But none of those approached the scale of the CrowdStrike outage, whose repercussions are still being felt. “I don’t think it’s too early to call it,” Australian security consultant Troy Hunt said in a social media post. “This will be the largest IT outage in history.”
Parmy Olson writes in Bloomberg Opinion that one of the most disturbing things about Friday’s devastating global outage is how routine such ruinous events have become. This time however, the scale was unprecedented. That should spur Microsoft and other IT firms to do more than simply administer a band-aid, Olson says. 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.