Global IT outage disrupts key sectors, spurs calls for reform
A major global IT outage has severely disrupted industries worldwide, including airlines, media, and banking sectors. The disruption, one of the most significant since 2017, has highlighted the vulnerabilities intrinsic to shared cloud-based platforms and brought significant criticism of the risks associated with reliance on these platforms.
Tom Simnett, founder and director of Manchester-based tech company Initforthe, expressed concerns about the dependency on cloud-based services. “It is an unfortunate consequence of everyone relying on cloud-based platforms that everyone uses is that when they go down, everyone is affected, and it becomes hugely disruptive,” he stated. Simnett stressed that unified systems such as Office 365 streamline business processes, but they also create a single point of failure, potentially subjecting companies to extensive operational risks.
Dafydd Vaughan, Chief Technology Officer at Public Digital, echoed similar sentiments. Vaughan, who has been instrumental in the UK's Government Digital Service, noted that today’s outage illustrates the susceptibilities in the interconnected digital world. “This issue seems most likely to have been a mistake – a faulty update pushed out to hundreds of millions of computers around the world,” he observed. This ongoing issue demonstrates the need for companies and governments to develop robust mitigatory strategies to buffer themselves against such failures.
Vaughan elaborated that a major contributing factor to the crisis was the failure to incrementally test the update before widespread deployment. He urged organisations to adopt a gradual rollout process, trialling updates on a limited number of machines to ensure compatibility and functionality. "Today’s crisis could have been avoided by companies rolling out computer updates on a few machines first to check they work, rather than sending them to all machines at the same time,” he asserted.
Similarly, Tom Marsland, VP of Technology at Cloud Range, pointed out the challenges in recovering from such an outage. The spokes involved in the recovery process, including manually booting affected PCs into recovery mode and administering fixes one by one, could be laborious. "This is not something that can be done remotely, and in many organisations, will require an administrator. This means someone from IT Support going computer to computer and doing this manually,” Marsland noted.
From Marsland’s perspective, the debacle was entirely preventable if appropriate change and configuration management had been in place. He underscored the need for comprehensive internal testing and a phased rollout of updates to catch and rectify potential glitches quickly. “This will take days, probably weeks, for larger organisations. Unfortunately, as is the case in many cyber breaches as well, this is nothing new. Organisations’ failure to follow best practices with testing and deploying patches... is the root cause of this,” he emphasised.
Vaughan added a broader critique of the monopolistic tendencies in the digital service industry. He emphasised that the concentration of control among a few companies could amplify risks, making the case for increased competition and diversification in essential digital service providers. “The Government needs to consider the risk that comes with so few companies controlling so much of our essential infrastructure,” he said. "This introduces risk too. We need to balance the gains against the risk and be aware that issues like this can – and increasingly will – happen.”
The outage and the resulting imputations of the digital community underscore the pressing need for more resilient infrastructure, stricter testing protocols, and a more diversified digital service ecosystem. As technologies advance and become more intertwined with everyday life, ensuring their reliability and security becomes paramount.
