Well folks, Y2K finally happened. It just came 24-and-a-half years late.
What happened: A global cyber outage wreaked havoc yesterday, hampering operations for banks, hospitals, airlines, daily Canadian business newsletters, and other vital institutions. It stemmed from a botched update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike of its Falcon platform on computers running Windows, causing systems to crash and PCs to turn into useless bricks.
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In Canada, Porter was forced to ground flights, major banks suffered outages, Telus reeled from customer support issues, and border services faced partial outages.
- CrowdStrike has a fix for the error, but the clean-up of this mess could take a long time to implement as some computers need to be manually rebooted to delete a specific file.
Zoom in: The error had a huge impact because of CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity dominance. It’s estimated the company controls 24% of the market and counts over half of all Fortune 500 companies as customers. It should go without saying that Windows is pretty dominant, too.
Why it matters: Over the years, corporations and governments have seen their IT services become increasingly consolidated to just a handful of overlapping tech companies. This boondoggle could be a wake-up call for these groups to diversify and decentralize.
Bottom line: The incident looks destined to become the largest cyber outage of all time, and the most expensive, causing billions in economic losses and ripple effects that could last for months.—QH