ONLY DISCONNECT

As the world returns to an even keel after an unprecedented computer outage caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, Chris Stokel-Walker looks at what other companies have the power to bring our lives to a halt at the flick of a switch

- Chris Stokel-Walker

It is just over a week since the mammoth outage that grounded flights, cancelled hospital appointments and operations, and derailed supermarket and bank payment systems last week.

More than 8.5 million computers running Microsoft Windows were left locked in a state of perpetual start-up as the blue screen of death (BSOD) spread around the world – triggered by a fault in a file CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, provided as a third party to Windows that was ironically designed to keep things safe.

Before the panic ensued, few had ever heard of CrowdStrike, but in just a few hours the company’s reputation was in tatters. Its stock price closed trading on 22 July at $263.91 (£205.30), down a third in less than a month. Its CEO George Kurtz was forced to issue an immediate and unreserved apology for the doomed software update that caused the outage, and the $10 Uber Eats vouchers he has since offered as a make-good is unlikely to cut it.

It is now officially the biggest outage in history and “a reminder of the fragility and systemic ‘nth-party’ concentration risk of technology that runs everyday life: airlines, banks, telecoms, stock exchanges and more,” says Aleksandr Yampolskiy, CEO and co-founder of SecurityScorecard, a firm that tracks and rates cybersecurity across organisations.

His company’s data suggests that just 15 companies account for nearly two-thirds of all cybersecurity products and services – meaning if anything unforeseen went wrong with them, like it did with CrowdStrike, they have the potential to bring the world to a halt.

But who are some of these biggest companies and who is behind them?

Fastly

Vital to your day-to-day experience in the digital world, like CrowdStrike, the cloud computing services provider was founded in 2011, and works by providing so-called “edge cloud” services: bringing storage of files that users encounter online closer to them.