Some Thoughts On Today's Internet Outages

If you've followed the news, or for that matter tried to interact with any large companies today, you'll probably be aware that there has been a fairly major outage of Microsoft systems. It has affected airlines, media companies, banks, the British NHS and Royal Mail, and a host of other organisations around the world. It also apparently hit AWS (Amazon Web Services) quite hard.

Apparently the cause was a faulty update by CrowdStrike, a company providing IT security solutions to large corporations. Most anti-virus and security software needs admin-level access to IT systems, and it's reported in this case that some Windows 10 computers were "bricked" by the issue.

Image by Boyan Chen from Pixabay

I've got a number of thoughts about the outage.

It could have been a lot worse Although a lot of big businesses were badly affected, mobile phone networks mostly seemed to stay up. Small websites were sometimes slowed down but not wiped. The cause was identified quite fast and solutions rolled out (or rolled back) quite fast - by the end of the day things are getting back to whatever passes for normal.

It is worrying how vulnerable the internet is. All it took was a problem with a single update from a company most of us had never heard of before to create what is already being described as the biggest outage in history.

Decentralisation didn't help us. Our nice decentralised platforms are useless if we can't access the internet or if vital systems go down. Perhaps there's a lesson here that if the crypto sphere is to truly succeed it needs to be on a separate genuinely decentralised network. No, I don't know how we get there.

It's the best argument in favour of cash and against CBDC's. My wife went to the shops. She was able to pay using cash, while a crowd of people milled around confused that their debit cards weren't working or were very slow. Just imagine how bad it would have been if all we were allowed to pay with was a CBDC that went down ?

This will be how the start of World War 3 will look. Microsoft and governments were very quick to tell us that this was an outage due to error not cyber attack.

But just imagine the chaos if Russia's response to the attack on their Nordstream pipeline had been to cut the main internet cable across the Atlantic ?

If or when the NATO-Russia war goes hot, one of the first things to happen will be massive cyber attacks, the cutting of many sub-sea internet cables, and the downing of numerous satellites most likely including enough of Starlink's ones to compromise their network. The internet will be out of action for a long time (or forever) for us normal people !

Corporate responses were very poor. Most companies affected didn't email us until late this afternoon. DPD were a notable and honourable exception.

Despite this happening early this morning (UK time), Royal Mail didn't send out an email about it until mid afternoon.

Most status pages I visited showed everything was working as normal, confirming in my mind that they are nothing but pages designed to convince users that any problems are at their end.

Our ISP was down and we had no internet for most of the day, claiming it was a local issue but unable to say what it was - it seems very coincidental ! A notable plus was that I was able to keep my business running by using the contingency I'd set up of creating a local hotspot on my mobile phone and tethering it to the PC. It was lucky that the mobile network I'm with didn't seem to be too badly affected by the outage, although I'd be wary of assuming that will always be the case.

Conspiracy theories abound. That doesn't mean they are wrong, just unproven. The two most popular I've seen are...

That CrowdStrike (a Blackrock company) was acting to both knock out media companies and put something else into the headlines to divert attention from the news that Austin Private Wealth LLC (another Blackrock company) had shorted a billion dollars worth of shares in Truth Social the day before the assassination attempt on Trump and then tried to reverse the transaction claiming it was just "an error".

The other, slightly less sensational one is that with Windows 10 PC's being worse affected, that is was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to force everyone onto Windows 11. I can see Linux becoming more popular after this !

So did the outage affect you ? Did you even notice ? Is three anything you will be doing differently to mitigate a future outage like this ?