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As the fog of war lifts and we begin to pick up the pieces of the global Windows outage, I’ve been thinking seriously about the nature of our current digital society. I have to say, I’m genuinely concerned.
Today’s disaster will hopefully prove relatively short-lived; a few hours and everything will seemingly return to normal, much to the chagrin of office workers who thought Microsoft Teams was dead and they could take Friday off. But this outage was symptomatic of a larger, often forgotten problem: the world has become overly dependent on a small number of software platforms, and a vulnerability in those platforms is a vulnerability for everyone.
What exactly happened?
If you’ve been following the Windows outage that occurred earlier today, July 19th, closely, feel free to skip a few paragraphs. I’ll try to keep this explanation short, though.
What essentially happened was a glitch in the CrowdStrike Falcon endpoint protection software – a sort of advanced cybersecurity platform for enterprises, think antivirus on steroids – that led to a wave of “Blue Screens of Death” hitting Windows PCs at businesses around the world. While the exact nature of the glitch has not yet been disclosed, it was likely able to cause such a massive impact specifically because endpoint protection programs like this are given high-level access to control your system, allowing them to quickly
Given how much businesses and government agencies rely on Windows every day, and how widely CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software has been deployed in recent years, it was perhaps inevitable that something like this would eventually happen.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft wanted to remind users that the outage was not caused by a “security incident or cyber attack”but rather an isolated outage within a routine update that has since been identified and resolved by the CrowdStrike team.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been implemented. We…July 19, 2024
But now everything is okay, right?
Wrong. If this doesn’t worry you, I don’t know what to tell you: this outage only lasted a few hours and was likely caused by a simple combination of human and system error, and yet it still caused a huge amount of problems.
From the silly (British pubs unable to take app orders) to the serious (Alaska 911 services going down entirely), the impacts have been wide-ranging. It’s easy to forget just how reliant our global digital infrastructure has become on platforms like Windows, Google, and AWS. It sounds ridiculous to say that a problem with bluescreening on Windows PCs could prevent you from shopping at your local supermarket, and yet that’s exactly what thousands of people experienced this morning.
I’m not sure if anyone actually died as a result of this outage, but it is not impossible. With emergency phone lines down in parts of the US, while doctors’ surgeries and hospitals in the UK experienced serious problems, the impact on healthcare has been significant, if temporary.
Healthcare is a problem industry for modern software
When I was undergoing treatment for lymphoma, before I started here at TechRadar, I wrote for Maximum PC Magazine about my experiences observing technology in hospitals. While the medical hardware itself was usually modern, cutting-edge technology, it was often connected to outdated laptops and cart PCs running Windows 7, Vista, or even XP—an operating system that turns 21 in August. According to the most recent reports, older Windows devices were the hardest hit.
These operating systems will no longer receive important security and stability updates from Microsoft, as Windows 7 officially reached end-of-life in January 2020. This increases the need for third-party cybersecurity tools like those from CrowdStrike. But as we saw today, it introduces even more points in the pipeline where things can potentially go wrong.
Healthcare is a critical sector, and when disasters like this happen, lives are put at risk. But the impact extends far beyond just one sector; for example, when most US airlines were hit by the outage, terminals were thrown into chaos, and those massive delays will undoubtedly have had a ripple effect across virtually every sector, as people are late for important meetings.
And then we haven’t even mentioned the social aspect: how many people in the US are taking a last-minute flight at any given moment to attend the birth of a child or the final moments of a family member?
This was an accident – next time it might not be so
While the CrowdStrike outage was most likely an honest programming error, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about the potential damage that intentional attacks could cause.
Cybercriminals are already having a holiday: With CrowdStrike’s security systems likely disabled on many affected systems, it could be open season for cybercrime as hackers work overtime to discover potential new vulnerabilities. As we noted in our live blog , it’s also likely we’ll see a sharp increase in phishing attempts, with emails and DMs urging affected users to click on dubious links or download fake CrowdStrike apps.
It really puts things into perspective to see how much chaos can be caused across our global tech infrastructure by the wrong piece of code in the right place. This short-lived outage was caused by a single rogue driver update – imagine what a dedicated hacker or a disgruntled tech employee could do with the right access.
So what’s the solution? Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix. While the problem originated with CrowdStrike, I have to place at least some of the blame on Microsoft: while I understand that they need to make money, it’s simply unacceptable that critical infrastructure like hospitals and emergency services continue to use unsupported, outdated systems that are more vulnerable to cyberattacks and outages.
Perhaps the software industry will wake up today and realize that better digital security and less interdependence of systems are a necessary change. But I doubt that will happen.
