When Computers Go Dark

Two months ago, what should have been a routine software update by a security company, CrowdStrike, crashed millions of computers around the world running Microsoft Windows. Airlines grounded flights. Subways stopped. Operators of 911 lines couldn’t dispatch help. Stores shut down. Hospitals canceled surgeries.

The chaos, though it lasted only a few days, was telling. New advances make our lives easier, but there are trade-offs. They can vanish quickly — in an outage, a hack or a pandemic. And as the economy has become more dependent on a smaller number of technology companies, we’ve become more susceptible to hiccups that affect them. American cellphones, for instance, stopped working in Europe for several days in June, stranding many travelers. We’re “highly digitized, highly interdependent, highly connected, and highly vulnerable,” said Jen Easterly, who leads the Homeland Security Department’s agency focused on digital infrastructure.

A House hearing yesterday and other government agencies are looking into how an errant sliver of buggy software touched off the CrowdStrike meltdown. This outage was not the work of villainous foreign hackers. Instead, it was simply a reminder of how reliant we are on our tech and the companies that make it. They are corporate paragons of innovation, success and wealth. But every year there are reasons to wonder if they have the incentive or even the capability to be trustworthy stewards of our collective security.

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