Global IT Outage: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

If you thought the recent global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike was bad, brace yourself: this was just a warm-up act. The truth is, as our lives become more entangled with IT and AI, we're courting digital disaster on a scale we've never seen before. No amount of political will or cash infusion can shield us from the looming tech catastrophe. Buckle up, because the next big crash will make CrowdStrike look like child's play.

The CrowdStrike Debacle: A Minor Glitch

On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike—a cybersecurity giant—pushed an update that plunged the world into chaos. Airports ground to a halt, banks froze, and businesses everywhere were thrown into disarray. 8.5 million Windows devices crashed, and recovery was a laborious nightmare involving manual fixes on each machine. If this doesn’t scare you, it should because this was just a little taste of our digital vulnerabilities.

IT: The Achilles Heel of AI

Everyone touts AI as the saviour of the modern world, but here’s the dirty little secret: AI is only as reliable as the weakest link in the IT infrastructure it depends on. AI systems demand vast amounts of data, robust computational power, uninterrupted connectivity and most importantly, a network infrastructure that runs like a Swiss clockwork.

Disrupt any of these, and your shiny AI-driven solutions become expensive virtual paperweights.

That’s why AI might turn out to be a house of cards. A single cyberattack, a rogue software update, or even a power outage can send it all crashing down. The more we rely on AI to run our critical systems [and lives], the more we gamble with our future. We’re building skyscrapers on sand, and the tide is coming in.

The Nord Stream Parallel: A Taste of Real Chaos

Remember the Nord Stream pipeline attacks? It disrupted gas supplies across Europe and sent shockwaves through global markets. Now, guess what else lies there on the bottom of the sea? Right, our transatlantic fibre cables!

Imagine if these fibre optic cables were targeted, say, by the Russians, who are still pretty upset that someone blew their multi-billion dollar, nano-coated, high-tech pipelines out of the water.

Their equivalent, our fibre cables, are the digital version of oil pipelines and they transport the lifeblood of our modern societies, data. They connect continents and literally ensure that our digital societies run smoothly.

Cutting any of these cables would be an apocalypse. Data packages would get jammed like cars on a blocked highway, global communications would cease, financial markets would collapse, emergency services would be paralysed, and everyday life as we know it would grind to a halt.

The Nord Stream attacks were a relatively regional crisis; cutting the transatlantic cables would be a global catastrophe. The economic and social chaos would make the Nord Stream incident look like a minor inconvenience.

The Futility of Prevention

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. We can’t prevent these outages. The pace of technological change is relentless, spawning new vulnerabilities faster than we can patch the old ones.

Even if the global Telecoms would be throwing endless money streams at the problem, which they don’t due to collapsing revenues, that won’t fix it. Resources are limited, and the threats are evolving.

As we have see with the CloudStrike incident, human error is inevitable. One wrong line of code, one misconfigured server, and we’re back to square one. Cyber adversaries—especially state-sponsored ones—are getting smarter and more dangerous. They’re not just playing catch-up; in many cases, they’re ahead of us. Some countries even maintain military units dedicated to cyber attacks, and no, not only the Russians.

And when the next big attack comes, it won’t just be a localised issue; it will be a global crisis.

Embrace the Chaos: Building Resilience

We need to face some facts: our digital world is a fragile construct. Rather than pretending we can prevent every disaster, we should focus on building societies that can withstand the inevitable.

This means robust incident response plans, redundant systems [as far as possible], and diversified and decentralised technology stacks. Continuous monitoring, upgrading and regular testing should be non-negotiable.

And we should foster collaboration and information sharing across industries and borders, a proposition less and less realistic in the current geopolitical climate.

Advanced cybersecurity measures, including AI-driven threat detection, are essential. But let’s be clear—these are no more than band-aids on a gaping wound. The inherent issues of complexity and interdependence can’t be fully mitigated, and people who talk about redundancy in situations like the CloudStrike outage have not understood the problem.

Conclusion: The Coming Storm

The CrowdStrike outage was nothing more than a warning shot, a faint taste of the real storm which is yet to come. As we hurtle towards a future dominated by AI and IT, we’re setting ourselves up for a fall with a crash landing. The next outage will make CrowdStrike look like a blip. It’s not a question of if, but when.

Are you ready for the chaos? Absolutely not! But by acknowledging our systems’ limitations and taking proactive steps to build resilience, we might just survive the digital disasters on the horizon. Prepare yourself— because You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!