Jonathan Welburn
If you couldn’t use your laptop last week, you weren’t alone. A computer system disruption swept the globe on Friday, grounding flights, stopping trains, and bringing businesses to a halt. Worse, the outage was traced to a single security update, underscoring the risks of global interconnectivity, particularly among firms critical to public safety, economic stability and national security.
The blackout came courtesy of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that reportedly serves some 29,000 customers. They weren’t the only ones affected; when a CrowdStrike software update went awry, the computers and tablets of millions of people using Microsoft Windows went kaput.
This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced a domino effect like this. The enduring lesson of the 2008 banking crisis was that failures in one corner of a market can cascade through the entire economy. That’s why Congress deemed certain banks “too big to fail” and subsequently adopted new regulations and oversight in the financial system. The government has identified “global systemically important banks,” which it consistently monitors through stress tests.
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