Today, the world woke up to find that it’s computing power was largely broken. Airports, ATMs, banks, warehouses, healthcare providers, 911 dispatchers, retailers, and many more industries were taken offline by a defective patch deployed by Crowdstrike to its customers overnight.
The amount of impact across these sectors shows the significant monopoly that these companies have on the computing sector. We put a lot of trust in these companies to deliver reliable service - so much trust that we don’t have a backup plan for running our world without them. When they go tits up, the world stops, the economy falters, and people ultimately suffer.
As IT experts, we must always strive to have a disaster recovery strategy in place for dealing with outages, but how can we be sure that the services we use on our machines themselves which underpin everything aren’t going to stop working? We may have a plan in place for dealing with AWS outages, by moving our critical infrastructure to Azure or on-prem machines, but if we can’t boot our laptops in the first place, we can’t do much work at all.
At some point, a disaster recovery strategy always comes down to being able to have hands on keyboards; but now it seems we can’t even guarantee that those keyboards will be any use to us.