Is the UK resilient enough to withstand a major cyber-attack?

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.

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