The computer outage that paralyzed vital operations at airports, banks, businesses, media companies, and hospitals forces an important lesson on us all.
While technology is supposed to make our lives easier, it can cause massive disruptions when something goes wrong, such as an error in a software update as in the case of the global tech outage last Friday, July 19, 2024. The outage caused ripple effects that impacted several industries.
The outage wasn’t a cyberattack or terrorist act aimed at freezing vital operations in several countries. CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity firm, said the outages were caused by “a defect found in a single content update of its software on Microsoft Windows operating systems.” Not all companies were affected—only those that had CrowdStrike and operated on Microsoft Windows.
In the Philippines, Cebu Pacific was affected by the outage, causing flight delays and leaving passengers stranded at airports for several hours. Philippine Airlines, on the other hand, reported that the outage did not affect them. Why? Because the airline uses different operating systems or does not have CrowdStrike.
This is the first lesson for airlines and other businesses dependent on technology in their operations. It pays not to be loyal to one computer program but to diversify across different technologies that can act as a backup service when one system goes down. What happened on Friday underscores the need for redundancy, reliable backup systems, and disaster recovery plans to reduce downtime and mitigate the effects of an outage.
A resilient information technology (IT) infrastructure prioritizes the ability to minimize outages and recover quickly after an emergency, rather than paying loyalty to a single system. Even technology services that are supposed to provide security must be studied and subscriptions to more than one system should be considered. There’s the matter of the price, but considering what happened, the costs forced on industries were bigger.
Another learning point is the importance of having emergency measures in place when such an outage occurs. People need to know what to expect during such incidents, how to restore systems, regain access, and effectively communicate emergency procedures to internal stakeholders and customers.
The global tech outage requires a reboot in the way we think about the use of computer systems. Accidents do happen, such as this one caused by human error, but the best we can do is to prepare for any eventuality.
Whenever we have problems with our computers or when the screen freezes, the first thing we do is reboot or turn the device off and on again. In most cases, it works and restores us back to what we were working on before the disruption.
At this point, we need to reboot our systems, our dependence on technology, and our mindset about technology, which isn’t perfect at all.
I’m sure the affected businesses are now conducting a post-mortem of last Friday’s incident. That is the reboot we all need.