I’ve published a post on the Public Digital blog with immediate reflections on the CrowdStrike outage which impacted millions of computers around the world.

The full disruptive knock-on impact of any such outage will last for days if not weeks. Full recovery will take a while longer. The economic impact will be huge.

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Here’s a few immediate reflections on this event - which while startling in scale is unfortunately neither unique nor unexpected.

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  1. Mistakes happen. Attacks happen.
  2. Even when there are mistakes, the risk of catastrophic failure on this scale is a factor of the world’s interconnected IT infrastructure.
  3. The risk is greatest where there are highly consolidated IT supply chains.
  4. Technology risk is a life and death issue.
  5. This risk isn’t taken seriously enough by business leaders or global leaders.

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Unfortunately, just like a pandemic, major global IT outages are a “when” not an “if” problem. Something WILL go wrong - and it will be worse than today.

Will we be ready for it?