Last week, more than 8.5 million computers stopped working. The post-industrial and very much digital world in which we live, much of it anyway, came to a halt as well.
Airlines couldn’t check in travellers. Hospitals had to find new ways to help patients, and restaurants resorted to pen and paper to take reservations.
Cyber security company CrowdStrike inadvertently caused the chaos with a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor software.
That software is supposed to detect cyber attacks and prevent this sort of cataclysmic problem.
The issue was fixed, mainly within 24 hours, but its residual effects, plus the millions in economic losses, have led many to think about what action is needed to prevent another IT meltdown.
In this episode of Business Extra, host Cody Combs speaks to Igor Bershadsky, an expert in computer networking and cybersecurity, and co-founder of Dubai-based Phron AI, to discuss the tech outage that crashed global systems.