Today on the 5: You may have heard that there was a small outage across many different services last week. While there was a lot of pain for many people across the globe, there may be an upside in making ordinary people understand how dependent on technology we are in fundamental ways.
Ozone Nightmare
A Necessary Wake Up Call
Welcome to your daily five for Monday, July 22nd, 2024. As many of you are either aware or well aware, depending on what your occupation is, there was an outage, a global outage of multiple different services last week, last, well, I guess technically, I've seen late Thursday, early Friday morning, some of that is probably overlap with the Azure outage from Microsoft. But regardless, at some point, between the second half of Thursday and the first half of Friday of last week, a crowd strike update, as far as we know, I don't know if that's the true story, but that's what's being said. And update was- and I'm not saying that as a conspiratorial thing, I'm saying that is in, we may not really know for a while what actually led to all this. There actually could be more than one thing. There has been- there's different stuff I've read that suggests that it wasn't just one thing. So whatever the cause was, as of the current time, what the official hypothesis or the blame that's being placed on CrowdStrike and being accepted, but basically by them, is that a bad update caused multiple Windows devices to have a blue screen of death. And this, of course, had a cascade effect because CrowdStrike is- I don't know if they are the top cybersecurity vendor as far as on-device security software, but they're certainly within the top three if they're not the top one. And I don't know if they're still going to be the top one at the end of this week or not. Their stock went down, came back up, and there's going to be some turbulence there. And the immediate aftermath, we'll see what the long-term effects are. But I think probably what I hope is the most beneficial outcome of all this is that it has made ordinary people who are not technology-focused, which is most people. You know, people who are with NIT and the technology space, we're already very aware of how interconnected so many of our systems are and how dependent our daily lives are on them. But that's easy to see when you're inside the space. If you're outside of it, certainly you know that, yes, you use the internet all the time and your devices have to all be connected and be online and everything else. But you may not really have a fundamental understanding. And this is not to say that people are ignorant of it in some kind of intentional way. It's just that if it's not something you understand or that you see often, like so many things, you just don't know about it. There are many things within my car that I don't understand how it drives. I understand some parts of it and I know that all the parts of my car as far as in terms of the transmission and engine systems and the wheels and the brakes, all that stuff has to work together or there are problems. I understand that. But could I tell you what connects the engine to the crankshaft? No, I couldn't do it. Could I tell you how my car transfers the engine energy into, or how the transmission system interacts with the engine? No, I couldn't. I know they're there. I know they're important. I couldn't tell you how they work. But I know that a failure of even a few small pieces within that system is going to start causing major problems. And that I think is now the, hopefully, something that, again, people who aren't necessarily cybersecurity experts, who may never have heard of CrowdStrike, who may not understand why a blue screen of death is a bad thing and why it would actually impact airlines with the news stories and everything that's going to come out as this goes on. And there are going to be investigations, I'm sure, because 911 systems were impacted, flights were obviously canceled, there's millions if we'll see billions of dollars in lost revenue and expenses and mitigation costs. There's going to be a high degree of visibility to this particular outage that may not have been present before when, okay, outlook goes down. Well, yeah, that affects everybody, but it's one component of what you're doing. Whereas this was across multiple sectors all at the same time. This is a serious event that, again, I think is going to permeate down to people who don't necessarily ordinarily care about technology or think about how it works. And that could be beneficial because it could get people to really understand how dependent we are on all these interconnected systems and how having one company as a single point of failure for vital, different services we use is probably not good. There may need to be a regulatory intervention here to make sure that there is not a single company that can end up causing, however, what, 12, 14 hours, however many is going to ultimately be found to be of serious outage. So look, in the moment it sucked for people who had to support this stuff, for people who were trying to use these things, people stuck in airports, all different places. But as a long-term effect, I hope that maybe this is something that gets, again, most people far more aware of how dependent they are of technology than anything we've seen before. Time will tell later.