A software failure in the web that makes up the global supply chain threatens to disrupt daily commerce for an indefinite period, showing how widespread reliance on the same system can create a worldwide crisis when that system goes down.<\/p>\n
It was still not known Friday morning how long it would take to address the issue, which cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attributed to an improperly executed update on Microsoft systems.<\/p>\n
Although Microsoft itself was not directly responsible for the outage, the worldwide reliance on a single common operating system <\/strong>and a major cybersecurity company, while useful when everything is running smoothly, creates the potential for a single point of failure to take down the entire planet, experts say.<\/p>\n In addition to many major airlines being unable to clear flights for takeoff, everything from port authorities and train systems to hospitals and banks were affected.<\/p>\n Wesley Miller, a research analyst and former Microsoft employee who writes about IT issues, said the outage shows the price of interconnectedness and the dangers of market concentration.<\/p>\n Not only was there an overreliance on Microsoft, he said, but Friday\u2019s outage could also be blamed on the consolidation of vendors in the cybersecurity space. Backed by Google and one of the most valuable cybersecurity firms in the world, CrowdStrike has made a number of strategic acquisitions in recent years.<\/p>\n \u201cAt end of the day, everyone is operating with one thing, and they\u2019re trying to move faster than bad guys to avoid getting attacked,\u201d Miller told NBC News.<\/p>\n Miller also placed some blame on the lingering staffing challenges created by Covid.<\/p>\n \u201cTeams everywhere are really stretched thin; IT staff, testing staff, everyone is pulled to their max,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone is still pretending everything is fine, when there\u2019s been massive changes all around us.\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, high-profile examples of companies not affected by the outage have previously faced their own issues because they weren\u2019t using state-of-the-art technology. Notably, Southwest and Frontier airlines appeared to be the only large U.S. air carriers operating without incident Friday. Two years ago, Southwest\u2019s entire system shut down as a result of its reliance on an antiquated scheduling system.<\/p>\n \u201cThis will happen and keep happening as long as everything is built around fragile supply chains where the same companies turn up time and time again,\u201d Jennifer Cobbe, assistant professor of law and technology at the University of Cambridge, posted on X Friday.<\/p>\n \u201cThis means no resilience: One of them goes down, potentially everything goes down \u2014 with widespread and unforeseeable consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n The speed at which companies must now move to compete with one another creates inherent instability, Miller said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re clearly operating faster than the systems we\u2019ve built can handle,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to start taking a look at more fail-safes.\u201d<\/p>\n Miller is not optimistic they will be easily implemented.<\/p>\n In the wake of the pandemic, there was a great amount of discussion about how to make global supply chains more resilient. In 2021, President Joe Biden held what was billed as the\u00a0Summit on Global Supply Chain Resilience\u00a0alongside European Union nations and 14 other countries. Last fall, the White House released a new issue brief on the topic, noting: \u201cEconomic research has long been clear that deeply intertwined supply chains can turn micro disruptions into macro-level effects.\u201d<\/p>\n The brief noted that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration\u2019s CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act were all designed to help boost supply-chain resiliency.<\/p>\n But Miller believes companies\u2019 requirements to maximize profits means the global commerce system will continue to be vulnerable indefinitely, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so little shareholder value in taking a little extra time to do the right thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n A software failure in the web that makes up the global supply chain threatens to disrupt daily commerce for an indefinite period, showing how widespread reliance on the same system can create a worldwide crisis when that system goes down. It was still not known Friday morning how long it would take to address the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}