Editorial: Freaky Friday

CHENNAI: It’s hard to single out a Windows user who hasn’t shuddered at the sight of the ominous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), when the operating system encountered a fatal error, and she/he has had to dial tech support, to revive the laptop/PC amidst the rush of a peak work day. That scene just played out in a philharmonic fashion across the world as a global tech outage on Friday grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and kicked media outlets off air. The disruption that affected firms, services across the world was pinned down on the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike which said the issue was not a security concern or a cyberattack — but a glitch that occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

The episode emerged as a reminder of the fallout of essential technologies being cannibalised by a handful of software behemoths, clubbed under Big Tech. The outage involving Microsoft (a top-three vendor to 84% of businesses), has been branded as the biggest IT meltdown in history. But it’s not an isolated event. Over several years, we have played mute witness to events involving catastrophic downtimes that have hit some of the biggest technology players in the world.

From social media shutdowns zeroed in on Meta (previously Facebook) and Meta-owned Instagram, as well as total blackouts on WhatsApp (Meta-owned), which crippled all our communications, to the big daddy — Gmail going AWOL on account of an unexplained server issue at Google’s end, it seems like netizens the world over are at the mercy of a few leviathan enterprises, whose shtick revolves around subsuming any competition in sight. Even Amazon runs nearly 30% of the internet through Amazon Web Services.

The financial implications and the human costs of this recent outage are being pored over even as this newspaper goes to press. Cybersecurity experts haven’t ruled out the possibility of fatalities being reported owing to this disruption, especially in the healthcare space. One analyst had pointed out that real harm would be caused by the outage as systems we’ve come to rely on at critical times are not going to be available. Hospitals would struggle to sort out appointments and those who need care may not get it. Other specialists in the IT space were compelled to sheepishly admit that the downtime was a very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure.

But it would be a misnomer to assume that such technological vulnerabilities are only limited to cyberspace. What we have been seeing over the past several decades is a near total concentration of critical innovations and solutions in the custody of a few privileged nations in the global north, specifically in the Western nations. A nation that has borne the severe brunt of such monopolies is Iran. The Islamic Republic, which has a horrid track record vis-a-vis air safety has been straitjacketed with sanctions that prevents Tehran from accessing vital airplane components from major manufacturers based in the US and France. Beyond aircraft and spare parts, these embargoes have also prevented the country from receiving appropriate technical know-how for repairs and maintenance of its fleet.

Such examples should offer nations impetus to consider spreading out their technology risks. To prevent being held to ransom by a handful of companies, we need to promote diversity in innovation and fund start-up sandboxes that offer innovators the freedom for trial and error.