When tech showed Covid symptoms

Friday morning, tech showed some serious Covid symptoms across the world when in a blue screen nightmare, an update by 'cloud-first' cybersecurity company resulted in crashing Windows systems, grounding flights, and holding businesses and emergency services hostage. Microsoft will have to investigate how a single update could cause an outage on this global scale. Tech companies go to extraordinary lengths to protect their platforms from cyberattack. They also build powerful systems to detect bugs that could be uploaded in the process. Microsoft failed to do so as CrowdStrike tweaked its virus scanner that had an adverse effect on computers running on Windows. The fix is to boot computers in safe mode and delete the offending file. But this has to be done on millions of machines. The outage, one of many in recent times but by far the most severe, will have a long tail.

Yet, the way technology has evolved, keeping computers updated with the latest version of their operating systems, Apple and Linux included, remains the best defence against malicious bits of code. There has been no report of data breach during the outage. So, it'll be a matter of fixing processes once software integrity has been restored, which Microsoft claims was almost immediate - an outage is usually over by the time it's detected. But its customers - some of the biggest brands in the world - can't be blamed for feeling powerless over the extreme centralisation of core operations. Money was lost as the initial Microsoft, CrowdStrike statements stopped short of issuing apologies. Businesses can't be faulted for devising coping strategies against something going horribly wrong with a routine software update.

Software is being updated continuously in all manner of devices. Systems are becoming better at detecting anomalies. With more businesses moving to the cloud, software companies will have to ramp up their service delivery in productivity enhancements and increased security. The world is now dependent on giant companies remotely managing millions of devices to power economic activity. Friday was a wake-up call.