An information security expert says Friday’s widespread technology outage that brought down computer systems across the globe is another example of how reliant the world has become on a small number of tech companies.
“Everything these days is dependent on computer systems, and when they’re not available, companies just can’t operate,” Alex Hamerstone, advisory solutions director at Ohio-based TrustedSec, told BNN Bloomberg in an interview Friday morning.
The company at the centre of the outage, CrowdStrike, said Friday morning that a software fix had been deployed and that it was working to get systems back online for its customers, but the impacts are expected to be felt throughout the day and beyond in the form of delays and closures.
CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity firm, sells antivirus and other protective software designed to protect Microsoft Windows systems from malicious attacks, but a software update from the company overnight seemingly contained a defect which crippled Windows systems and took them offline.
“(The update) apparently had some issues which caused the Microsoft servers and endpoints that were running to have significant issues and not be able to run,” Hamerstone said.
“And when computer systems are down, your company is generally down as well.”
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, reiterated in a social media post Friday that the incident was not a cyber attack, and that customers remain “fully protected.”
Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can…
‘It just takes time’
Hamerstone said that in a situation like this, computer systems need to be manually rebooted, which takes a significant amount of time given the prevalence of off-site data centres and the number of remote employees.
“It’s not as simple as IT staff just walking around and restarting these systems, it can be much more difficult and involved, and it just takes time,” he said.
Hamerstone added that there are ways to prevent outages like this in the future, including running more tests on software updates before they’re sent out.
“But I think the big story here is just really how dependent the world has become on a very small number of organizations,” he said.
“One company having an issue can have such wide-ranging effects across all different verticals and industries around the world.”