Microsoft’s IT outage reveals the fragility of our software systems and the risks of a more serious technology collapse
• Global Microsoft IT outage: latest updates
Planes grounded, trains delayed, television stations off air, hospital appointments cancelled, electronic payments halted. No, it wasn’t the start of a massive cyber-attack from Russia, or the backdrop to a Hollywood blockbuster, but an IT upgrade that unexpectedly went disastrously wrong.
That it had such widespread effects is to some extent testament to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, a well-known global dependency, and more particularly to a faulty software update pushed out by the security and anti-virus company CrowdStrike to its widely used Falcon software system.
About Author
More Stories
Newborns treated with antibiotics respond less well to vaccines, study shows
As a geneticist, I will not mourn 23andMe and its jumble of useless health information | Adam Rutherford
23andMe’s demise is a warning: the US needs to overhaul genetic data protection | Dalton Conley