Dick Hubert’s Worldview: The Microsoft/CrowdStrike meltdown: A harbinger of future tech disasters?
July 24, 2024 at 9:55 p.m.
Did the dramatic events on computer screens worldwide last week scare the living daylights out of you?
And no, I’m NOT writing about Donald Trump’s epic and tortuous nomination acceptance speech at last Thursday’s Republican convention—seen by tens of millions worldwide on screens of one kind or another. Although that could qualify.
I’ve been ruminating on the life-changing significance of the “blue screen of death” meltdown of Microsoft systems caused by a defective code upgrade from the internet security firm CrowdStrike.
Last Friday morning, as I listened to reports of airports and airlines worldwide shut down and the cries of stranded travelers, my wife and I were on our way to our long-scheduled annual physicals at Summit Health (formerly WestMed).
We were lucky. Their software system that keeps track of patient health, Athena, was unaffected. But the Microsoft/Crowd Strike fiasco caused our EKGs to be canceled, and the staff in the blood draw lab lost all computerization and was forced to handwrite everything, slowing down their dealings with patients and forcing a wait time for us of about an hour.
I was instantly reminded of my experience at my car dealer in June when my service adviser informed me that things were a “little chaotic” because their entire computer/software system was down and all their records of what past service had been done on my car and what needed to be done were inaccessible. I later learned that this was the case at some 15,000 dealerships around the country that use CDK Global software, which had been disabled due to a cyberattack.
By last weekend, the worldwide chaos caused by the CrowdStrike upgrade was coming into clearer focus.
As the Washington Post reported:
“The system failure ricocheted across the globe, as credit card systems went down in Australia, airlines in India handed out handwritten plane tickets, and courts in the United States delayed hearings, including one in the sex crimes case of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. And the impact reverberated across the giant’s (Microsoft’s) many clients in the public sector, with the Social Security Administration closing its local offices through the weekend and the Federal Communications Commission reporting disruptions to the 911 call service that forced some local dispatchers to switch to analog phone systems.”
Why this is just the beginning
By the time you’re reading this there’s a good chance that an army of tech workers have been able to bring their systems back to a near state of functionality and the “blue screen of death panic” will be over.
This is all temporary. Because the computerization of our society now is so complex, so interconnected, and so “deep,” the understanding is becoming widespread that these “glitches” will be common.
The CrowdStrike disaster is now confirmed to be the result of human error.
But you have to believe, as I do, that while human error is always an ongoing threat, there are bad actors out there who want to bring down our society with every conceivable kind of software attack.
Right now the most publicized of these plaguing our country in the public and private sectors are “ransomware” attacks where entire companies, local governments, hospitals, schools and more find their computer systems taken over by foreign based thieves who have disabled these institutions’ computer networks until vast sums are paid to get them unlocked.
CBS News reported that, regarding the aforementioned cyberattack on CDK Global: “CDK has not disclosed whether or not it has paid the group behind the ransom attack.”
I’m not surprised.
Many of these cyberattacks are the work of groups sponsored by our worst enemies.
In a time of war, you have to believe that undersea internet cables will be cut, and satellites will be attacked, to disrupt all communications.
If your credit card won’t work, if your bank’s ATM systems are down, if you can’t pump gas at your gas station, if your cable and cell phone service is down and your home computer is disconnected from the web, what then?
Taking the long view
This has been a moment for technology reporters to hit pause and think about the larger implications of the CrowdStrike disaster.
Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post wrote the following on July 19:
“What happened Friday brought to mind a threat that never fully materialized: Y2K. Twenty-five years ago, as we approached the turn of the century, some computer experts feared that a software bug would cause airplanes to fall out of the sky — along with all sorts of other calamities — the moment 1999 turned into 2000. Governments and private industry spent billions of dollars trying to patch up the computer problems in advance, and the big moment arrived with minimal disruption.
But the question of how vulnerable — or resilient — the global information networks of 2024 are cannot be easily answered. The systems are too numerous, too interconnected, for anyone to have full battlefield awareness.
Friday’s tech outage served as a fleeting reminder of the fragility of that invisible world, especially for those trying to catch planes, book surgeries or power up personal computers that had gone into a mysterious failure mode. Trending online all day was “Blue Screen of Death,” the nickname for the error message that appears when Microsoft Windows ceases operating safely. The Blue Screen of Death, people discovered, has in recent times taken on a gentler, less alarming shade of blue, as if someone had consulted a color theorist.”
David Streitfeld and Kate Conger in The New York Times were inspired to write this:
“The CrowdStrike outage disrupted but it has not yet been linked to any deaths. People have the weekend to complete their interrupted journeys. If CrowdStrike is lucky, the trouble will be forgotten within days if not hours.
Some day, though, the rest of us may not be so lucky, and some piece of boring technology — overloaded, neglected or poorly installed — will cause a genuine disaster. A software breakdown that causes a societal breakdown is probably better odds than A.I. bringing about world peace. The more networked the world gets, the greater the danger.
It would be a stupid way to go, as the poets anticipated long ago. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot. These days, of course, he would add a thumbs-down emoji.”
A final personal note and lookback
I’ve been dealing with malware since the earliest days of personal computers. I can remember my own company, Videoware Corporation, using IBM desktop computers with Microsoft’s first operating system. Our internet then was known as a “sneakernet,” with colleagues sharing workload by bringing floppy disks from one computer to another. Pre-historic. Yet even then we somehow got one of the first computer viruses and my most tech savvy colleagues worked overnight to clean up the mess.
Now I write this column on a Windows 11 desktop using Word in Microsoft 365, where it’s stored in the cloud, available even on my Apple devices via the Word app, allowing me in an interconnected world to write and file this column with the Westmore News editorial team from anywhere in the world.
I’ve accepted the entreaties of financial institutions, credit card companies, airlines, healthcare services, and just about every other business and governmental entity to go “paperless.”
Which means: T.S. Eliot had it right. I’ll be going out with a whimper, just like the rest of you. But no emojis.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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