About 8.5 million computers got disabled globally in the great outage that left users of Windows blue-walled last week, as estimated by Microsoft, which makes the operating software. This, the company noted, meant that less than 1% of the world’s devices with Windows got hit by the faulty update installed online by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm.
This data does little to reassure a world roiled by the chaos of disruptions across critical sectors like aviation, healthcare, banking and media. The Windows base is around 1.4 billion, and, as we know of Indian population numbers, even a tiny share left in the lurch is too many. No less empty is the relief that it wasn’t a cyberattack, the biggest of which has been the 2017 WannaCry hit that struck some 300,000 devices.
We saw the vulnerability of a world whose digital processes not only lack system diversity, the result of winner-takes-all market dynamics, but are served by centralized servers that reverse the empowerment of personal computing. As Bill Gates once noted, the once-lagging US overtook the Soviet Union in the space race partly because American astronauts insisted on pilot control of their spacecraft.
