We must break tech monopolies before they break us
The recent CrowdStrike crash took place at the intersection of bad cybersecurity and bad cloud computing. The headlines showed the world what many of us have long warned about — that concentrating power with a handful of tech titans is dangerous and can have devastating real-world consequences.
It didn’t take a cyberattack to cause this global crisis — just a simple mistake. One faulty update from CrowdStrike affected businesses, governments, hospitals, and airlines. The issue only affected certain Windows devices, yet it sent out ripples impacting a huge number of other systems as a result of our dependency on a few providers.
The fragility of our digitised world was brought into sharp focus by scenes of disrupted hospital services, grounded flights, and frozen financial transactions. When giants like Microsoft take a hit, the shockwaves can be devastating.
We’ve seen this play out time and again, and we’ll continue to see incidents like it until there’s a major shakeup in the ecosystem.
