‘Today, there’s only three companies that control global access to internet trade and commerce,’ a tech analyst said.
As the world’s communications and operations become more concentrated among a handful of tech oligopolies, they become both more efficient and more vulnerable.
This became apparent last week as an antivirus software update issued on the evening of July 18 by CrowdStrike, a security software company, caused more than a billion Windows-based computers to cease to function, taking down essential operations at airports, hospitals, 911 centers, police departments, trains, jails, and other municipal services, as well as corporate operations.
Appearing exhausted at times, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz spent July 19 issuing apologies on X and in television interviews, attempting to explain the error and the company’s efforts to resolve it.
“This was not a cyberattack,” Mr. Kurtz stated on the company’s website, explaining that the outage was caused by a defect in a software update for Windows in a security system called Falcon, which CrowdStrike produces.
“All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation,” he stated. “We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority.”
But many, including White House officials, were not reassured. Concerns were raised among government officials regarding public safety and national security.
A senior administration official stated on July 19 that “the White House has been convening agencies to assess impacts to the U.S. government’s operations and entities around the country.
“The White House is in regular contact with CrowdStrike’s executive leadership and tracking progress on remediating affected systems,” the official stated.
After tens of thousands of flights were delayed on Friday, airline service was largely restored by the weekend, as other services came back online. But because the software update took out individual computers, many have had, or still will have, to be restored individually and manually.
