July 19, 2024

expert reaction to mass global IT outage

Scientists comment on the global IT outage. 

Dr Deepak Padmanabhan, Senior Lecturer, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), said:

“The worldwide outage is unprecedented and unfortunate, but such events are a pointer to the state of affairs in our digital society today. First, it brings to fore the fragility of connected systems. When we decide to not store documents in the computer and instead choose the cloud (e.g., google drive, dropbox), we are trading off control for the convenience of accessing it anywhere. This also induces a dependency – that on connectivity – which becomes necessary at each instant of working on the document. This also increases the so called ‘attack surface’ – now, an attacker can capture details of your document from anywhere in the world. A slew of such decisions across various global sectors that we have made at the implicit behest of big tech companies has made each action of ours dependent on incessant and high-bandwidth connectivity. Second, an extreme high-connectivity paradigm enables capture of markets by big tech companies. These are often called ‘network effects’ – windows is able to gather the next hundred users much more easily than a low-popularity operating system. This bestows big tech corporations with extreme power, the scale of which has been illustrated by the outage. An outage linked to a single company is able to disrupt government services, flights, restaurants, and even small grocery stores – a single company has enormous power over the working of a nation’s society, something that the government can’t quite begin to think of matching. The outage is an excellent reminder of the state of affairs that one may call label as an extreme form of connexionist digital capitalism. We should take today’s outage as an opportunity to step back and look at such structural issues we have gotten ourselves in.”

Declared interests:

Dr Padmanabhan: None