Global tech outage exposes our digital dependency

“We have, as this shows, a lot of infrastructure that relies on single points of failure,” Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University and author of the forthcoming book “Taming Silicon Valley,” said Friday. “There is absolutely nothing that guarantees that we won’t have another incident like this, whether accidental or malicious.”

As more information emerged about the cause of the outage, it seemed clear that it was nothing more than an accident, caused by faulty software in an automated update from an Austin-based company called CrowdStrike. The big headline was the vulnerability of major industries like airlines and banking. But it was a tough time for anyone whose computer announced, without explanation, that it was not working on a Friday morning.

Consumers of technology expect software to perform, and it usually does. But that leads to complacency and digital illiteracy: we don’t remember anyone’s phone number, because on a smartphone you just tap the name and the call goes through. We don’t carry cash, because everyone carries plastic.

Life in the 21st century is pretty magical – until it isn’t.

Marcus fears that society will become even more vulnerable as we rely more and more on artificial intelligence. Of X, he wrote: “The world needs to up its software game dramatically. We need to invest in improving the reliability and methodology of software, not rush out half-baked chatbots. An unregulated AI industry is a recipe for disaster.”

The AI ​​revolution, which was not mentioned once during the June presidential debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, will make these systems even more interdependent and opaque, making human society more vulnerable in ways no one can fully predict.

Political leaders have been slow to respond to these changes, partly because few of them understand the technology. Even technologists cannot fully grasp the complexity of our globally networked systems.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the nerve center of the world’s IT systems is a giant black box of interconnected software that no one fully understands,” Edward Tenner, a technology scholar and author of the book “Why Things Bite Back,” said in an email Friday. “You might even say it’s a black box full of undocumented booby traps.”

What happened Friday was reminiscent of a threat that never quite materialized: Y2K. Twenty-five years ago, as the turn of the century approached, some computer experts feared that a software glitch would send planes crashing out of the sky—along with other calamities—as 1999 turned 2000. Governments and the private sector spent billions of dollars to fix the computer glitches in advance, and the big moment arrived with minimal disruption.

But the question of how vulnerable — or resilient — the global information networks of 2024 are cannot be answered easily. The systems are too numerous, too interconnected, for anyone to have full visibility into the battlefield.

Friday’s technical glitch served as a fleeting reminder of the fragility of that invisible world, especially for those trying to catch planes, book surgeries or boot PCs that had entered some mysterious failure mode. Trending online all day was “Blue Screen of Death,” the nickname for the error message that appears when Microsoft Windows stops operating securely. The Blue Screen of Death, people have discovered, has lately taken on a softer, less alarming shade of blue, as if someone had consulted a color theorist.

It did not go unnoticed that CrowdStrike, a company that provides software to ward off cyberattacks, was responsible for the outage. Tenner pointed out that throughout history, technologies intended to improve safety have often introduced new risks.

“Lifeboats and their deck reinforcements were installed after the Titanic destabilized an excursion ship on Lake Michigan, the SS Eastland, in 1915. More than 840 people died in Chicago Harbor when the ship capsized while being loaded,” Tenner said.

And then there’s the safety pin: It was swallowed by so many children that a surgeon developed a special instrument to remove it, Tenner said.

Brian Klaas, author of “Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters,” wrote on X after the outage that “we have designed social systems that are extremely sensitive to catastrophic risk because we are optimized to the max, with no slack, in hyperconnected systems. A small outage is now a huge one.”

Technological disasters can also be caused by natural causes. Many national security experts think of the risk that a powerful solar storm could knock out the power grid or damage satellites that are crucial for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and military surveillance.

Such satellites could also be targeted by a hostile adversary. U.S. officials have expressed concern that Russia could develop the capability to place a nuclear weapon in space that would threaten our satellites — and potentially create an exponential increase in space debris with catastrophic consequences.

Friday’s outage came about without geopolitical machinations, or anything dramatic like a thermonuclear explosion. It was simply the result of some bad code, a bug — a glitch in the system.

Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington and author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” pointed out that today’s interconnected technologies still have people in the mix.

“The digital economy is ultimately human,” she said, “made up of code and machines designed, driven, and occasionally drastically disrupted by human decisions and imperfections.”