A faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike on Friday caused widespread disruptions. From airlines to banks to hospitals, computers across the globe were disabled.  

Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster’s Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program, spoke to several media outlets in the hours and days after the outage and shared some insights with us.  

Can you put this outage into perspective — how big is the impact of this?  

It’s wreaked havoc, at an unparalleled scale: news channels were off the air, hospitals were challenged, banks were offline and 911 operators struggled. This is global and it’s really stunning and startling.  

The global tech outage is an argument against the corporate concentration in digital, and our lack of redundancy. The Microsoft stuff feels like an echo of the 2022 Rogers outage.

— Vass Bednar (@VassB) July 19, 2024

What does this say about our reliance on technology? Are there changes that should be made? 

I don’t want to knock our use of sophisticated software! In so many instances, we have improved processes and communication. But this hyper-connectivity can introduce vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, ‘blips’ — like this one — seem like an inevitable feature of our increasingly digital ecosystem. For me, it’s very evocative of the 2022 Rogers outage.  

“I think the Rogers outage stimulated some great conversations about our redundancy in systems, resiliency but also concentration in the sense that people felt sort of frustrated by how reliant we were on just one company,” she told CBC News.    

How do you think this affects people’s trust in the system?  

I definitely think outages like this are jarring — they are a reminder of the fragility of our digital ecosystems and global interdependencies. It’s fine to joke or groan that our Microsoft accounts at McMaster were up-and-running — but people around the world are stranded, some people’s paychecks haven’t hit their bank accounts — it’s concerning. There’s also a general trend of concentration in digital spaces, and the ubiquity of Microsoft systems is something a lot of people are chatting about in light of this outage.  

“These companies do their best to prepare for these instances, but also, when companies grow and they lack competition chomping at them and forcing their hands to be innovative and invest more in resiliency, people can be tempted to cut corners, and that’s just because they are delivering value to shareholders alongside their customers.”