Global Computer Failure: A Wake-Up Call for Organizations
Certain elements of Friday's global computer failure have happened before, and without the integration of emergency measures and better contingency plans by organizations, it will happen again.
The failure was caused by an update proposed by American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to its clients early Friday morning, which conflicted with Microsoft's Windows operating system, rendering devices worldwide unusable.
As one of the largest players in the highly competitive cybersecurity market, CrowdStrike's incident raises questions among sector analysts about whether operationally critical software control should remain in the hands of just a few companies.
However, the failure has also raised concerns among experts that many organizations are not well-prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure, such as a computer system or software within it, fails.
Moreover, easier-to-resolve digital catastrophes are looming on the horizon, with perhaps the greatest global computer challenge since the millennium bug, the "2038 problem", in just under 14 years, and this time, the world is infinitely more dependent on computers.
Ciaran Martin, former director of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, emphasizes that organizations must examine their computer systems and ensure there is sufficient security and redundancy to remain operational in the event of a failure.
Friday's incident is reminiscent of the famous millennium bug, or "Y2K," which occurred because early computers saved expensive memory space by only counting the last two digits of the year, which meant many systems were unable to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000, leading to critical errors.
The cost of mitigating the problem in the years leading up to 2000 was estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.