Digital Disruption

Dixya Poudel

As planes were grounded, hospitals went offline and TV broadcasts too went kaput, the IT (Information Technology) outage on July 19, 2024 left many organisations and businesses troubled. In a manner of minutes, the worldwide IT outage crippled over 8.5 million computers and virtual machines running Microsoft Windows. Such incident has been labeled as the blue screen of death (BSOD). It is called so because it causes computer’s screen to turn into an ominous shade of blue after it comes across an error that is difficult to resolve. As such, it signals a digital crisis as seen in July 19 when the world saw the largest outage in the history of IT. 

The parties involved were CrowdStrike and Microsoft. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant prompted the error while the tech behemoth, Microsoft got mired in the crossfire. When CrowdStrike updated the Windows software, it didn’t bide well with the computers involved. And the number of computers involved was in staggering millions. Microsoft and CrowdStrike worked swiftly to patch things up and avert a larger crisis as their collaboration on security software update turned into rather a huge glitch. It halted computers globally signifying the dark side of overreliance on technology. 

Consequently, there was widespread air travel chaos, healthcare glitches and financial service stutters as even ATMs stopped working because they all depend on IT to run smoothly. Such outage has highlighted the prevalence of machines in human world which is turning into an inescapable dependency. It calls for caution as this dependency could only deepen into the future with the emergence and evolution of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Since 2022, AI has been pervading in the threads of internet as it is increasingly used by companies to carry out automated jobs. 

Today people wake up to alarms from smart devices, navigate with GPS apps, and constantly keep an eye on emails, notifications, and news online. On an alarming note, smartphones are becoming an extension of its user. Many have even compared this dependency to a phantom limb. Researchers have labeled it as “possibly the biggest non-drug addiction of the 21st century” attributed to the screens which now act as the new dopamine dispenser. 

The fact is the world today is run more or less by machines as smartphones have become ubiquitous, AI is integrated into human resources, technology has skyrocketed, science continues to advance and tech giants spend billions on cybersecurity. But even the fortresses of cybersecurity are often infringed that cause fallouts every now and then leading to a loss of time and capital. 

It is remarkable what human mind can achieve. Its cognition is so intricate that it has created machines that abide by human command. Science fiction may spell a dystopian world in which machines rebel to overtake humans but till date, such dystopian world remains a fictional one even as it might be a heed for warning.

On July, the tech giant Microsoft and CrowdStrike hastened to minimise the adverse consequences as they offered assurances that the glitch would be resolved soon. And the outage did get resolved but not before it created a chaos and widespread panic in businesses and companies. As such, the July IT outage has brought to light the growing challenges of overreliance on technology.