EDITORIAL — A tech disaster

Last Friday, thousands of establishments were affected by what tech experts could only call a “global cyber outage”.

It happened when US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, a firm with more than 20,000 clients all over the world, released an update that was supposed to improve the Microsoft Windows operating system of its clients, but ended up disabling them instead.

Aside from airlines, different companies like banks, offices, and television channels, and even entire governments were affected by the outage. The resulting losses from the delays and service interruptions can be in the millions of dollars.

Here in the Philippines, some airlines were affected that day as they scrambled to do “manual” check-ins, and as of this writing there were still some people stranded in the airport.

This “tech disaster” shows how many of our establishments have become so dependent on some technologies that they can’t do without.

It also shows how vulnerable we can become when some things go wrong.

CrowdStrike as well as tech experts have repeatedly reassured its clients and the general public that what happened all over the world was not a deliberate attack, just the results of a faulty update.

We suppose that we should be happy with that news, but what if it had been a terror attack, or an attempt at holding an entire system hostage in exchange for money?

We cannot help but surmise that somewhere a lone wolf hacker or hacker group with ill intent is eyeing this development with interest, pleased at the prospect of causing worldwide disruption for fame or fortune. But it can get even worse, a terrorist group might be doing the same, thinking about all the economies that they could sabotage for whatever twisted reason.

Of course, such glitches are the price we have to pay to keep up with technology; reverting to older systems or ways of doing things may prove more disadvantageous in the long run. And this means we must be more equipped to prevent developments such as these, as well as be more prepared to deal with them when they happen.