![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/bbd8a310e54d4bd8381ab9af32cc5806.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The massive tech failure that caused chaos around the world raises important questions about the ownership and control of our digital world.\u00a0 The relatively unknown, cyber-security firm CrowdStrike admitted that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which was designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n The outage was caused by just a tiny software update from CrowdStrike put into Microsoft programs bringing them down globally\u00a0 My \u2018techie\u2019 programmer friends tell me that it looks like two very basic coding errors that should have been spotted and tested before being \u2018forced\u2019 onto Microsoft operating systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n CrowdStrike is a US firm based in Austin, Texas, listed on the US stock exchange and employs 8500 people with 24,000 clients. \u00a0As a provider of cyber-security services, it tends to get called in to deal with the aftermath of hack attacks.\u00a0 But it also provides protection from viruses and cyber attacks \u2013 but not apparently from its own programs.<\/p>\n The failure hit banking and healthcare services badly with over 8.5 million machines using Microsoft.\u00a0 Airlines and airport systems failed, leading to 3300 cancelled flights.\u00a0 Many companies\u2019 payroll systems have been affected, meaning that thousands of employees will not get their monthly wages on time.\u00a0 The outage could cost billions of dollars worldwide and take weeks to resolve because computers will require a manual reboot in \u2018safe mode\u2019, causing a massive headache for IT departments everywhere<\/p>\n What this outage reveals is the massive dominance of both Microsoft and CrowdStrike in computer software and cyber security. \u00a0Microsoft Windows has about 72% of the global market share of operating systems, while CrowdStrike\u2019s market share in the \u2018endpoint protection\u2019 security category is 24%.\u00a0 So the world\u2019s information, payments, transport and communications are dependent on the decisions and operations of just a few privately-owned \u2018for (massive) profit\u2019 companies.\u00a0\u00a0As one campaigner put it<\/a>: \u201cToday\u2019s massive global Microsoft outage is the result of a software monopoly that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global economy\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n One problem arising from this is that there is no diversification of operating systems.\u00a0 Again, my techie friends reckon that Microsoft Windows is a very poor operating system vulnerable to bugs and other coding errors, unlike other systems, including free \u2018open source\u2019 ones.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cFor decades, Microsoft\u2019s pursuit of a vendor lock-in strategy has prevented the public and private sectors from diversifying their IT capabilities.<\/em>\u00a0From airports to hospitals to 911 call centers to financial systems, millions today are feeling the consequences of the greed and ego of one of the most egregious offenders in Big Tech.\u00a0 When just three companies\u2014Microsoft, Amazon, and Google\u2014dominate the market for cloud computing, one minor incident can have global ramifications.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n What is the answer to this?\u00a0 The techies say we need more back-up systems, say at least two independent providers for their core operations, or at least ensure that no single provider accounts for more than about two-thirds of their critical IT infrastructure.\u00a0 Then if one provider has a catastrophic failure, the other can keep things running. But it is one thing to have back-up systems, it is another to diversify into different operating systems that risk being not compatible with each other.\u00a0 Again, my techie friends reckon that many bugs and outages are due to\u00a0different<\/em>\u00a0systems operating in one company.\u00a0 That means there is no one \u2018beginning to end\u2019 view.\u00a0 As a result, if things go wrong in one part of the business tech-wise, the tech teams cannot see why from the other end of the business process.\u00a0 Too many cooks have spoilt the broth.<\/p>\n Is more regulation of the big tech companies the answer? I think not.\u00a0\u00a0Regulation of capitalist \u2018for profit\u2019 companies by government regulatory agencies has been a proven failure in just about every sector: finance, utilities, transport, communications etc.<\/a>\u00a0 These companies just ride roughshod through regulations, pay their fines if found out,but then carry on \u2018business as usual\u2019.<\/p>\n What about breaking up the big tech monopolies? \u00a0This is a common cry from some<\/a>:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cit is long overdue that Microsoft and other Big Tech monopolies are broken up\u2014for good.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Not only are these monopolies\u00a0too big to care, they\u2019re too big to manage. And despite being\u00a0too big to fail, they have failed us. Time and time again. Now, it\u2019s time for a reckoning. We can\u2019t continue to let Microsoft\u2019s executives downplay their role in making all of us more vulnerable.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n But anti-trust measures that break up large companies have done little in the past.\u00a0 The major economies are even more dominated by large companies than they were one hundred years ago.\u00a0 Take the US government break-up of Standard Oil in 1911, when it controlled over 90% of the oil sector in the US.\u00a0 Did that break-up lead to the creation of lots of small \u2018manageable\u2019 oil companies globally that worked in the interests of society?\u00a0 No, because in many industries economies of scale must operate to raise productivity and for capitalist firms to maximise profitability.\u00a0 Now one hundred years after the Standard Oil break-up, we have even larger multi-national energy companies controlling fossil fuel investment and energy prices.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the same debate with digital banking.\u00a0 Just the day before the CrowdStrike global outage, the Bank of England reported that its banking transactions service CHAPS had broken down, delaying many time-sensitive payments.\u00a0 It seems that the international SWIFT cross-border payments system had an outage for several hours. \u00a0And indeed, there has been a litany of banking system failures at ATMs and in digital transactions over the last 20 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n The major banks worldwide spend huge amounts of money on speculating in the stock and bond markets, but do not spend nearly enough to ensure that basic banking services for the public (both households and small companies) work seamlessly.\u00a0 This is sometimes called \u2018tech debt\u2019. It has led some to argue that we need to stop full digitilisation of money transactions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cash remains a safe fallback when digital payments break down.\u00a0 The UK\u2019s\u00a0GMB Union<\/a>\u00a0said\u00a0\u201ccash is a vital part of how our communities operate\u201d. When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 Cash, it is argued, also provides more control over people\u2019s money.\u00a0 Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity.\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t want my data sold on, and I don\u2019t want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>he said.\u00a0Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n And the example of what the Indian government did in 2016 is a lesson on this.\u00a0 The Indian government abruptly wiped out most of the nation\u2019s paper currency in hopes of ending \u2018black money\u2019 and curbing corruption.\u00a0 But a November 2017\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0of 3,000 regulated agricultural markets for 35 major agricultural commodities, conducted during the three months immediately following demonetization, concluded that eliminating the high-currency notes had reduced the value of domestic agricultural trade by more than 15 percent in the short run, settling at 7 percent reduction three months late.\u00a0 In a largely \u2018informal economy\u2019, where the most vulnerable people still have no access to digital payments, this demonetization was a draconian measure that did a lot of damage to the poorest people in India.<\/p>\n But again, it would be wrong to conclude that we must go back to cash.\u00a0 Cash under the mattress may protect against the prying eyes of the authorities, but it would remain an inefficient method of money transactions and, as we know, an attraction to criminality.\u00a0 Of course, violent robbery of personal and corporate cash (as we see in action films) has now been replaced by the silent extraction of people\u2019s savings and company accounts by cyber scams.\u00a0 But that does not mean digitalization of money should be reversed.<\/p>\n The question really centres on who owns and controls our digital world. The high concentration of that digital power is yet another reason for the replacement of capitalist corporations by public companies democratically controlled by popular bodies and the tech workers in them.\u00a0 We need to bring into public ownership the Magnificent Seven of social media and tech companies<\/a>\u00a0currently led and controlled by multi-billionaires who decide what to spend and where.\u00a0 Then the huge waste of resources on tech projects designed just to make money and not to deliver useful and safe systems beneficial to people\u2019s lives could be reduced dramatically. Human error would not disappear, but the organisation and control of our increasingly digital world could be directed towards social needs not private profit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The massive tech failure that caused chaos around the world raises important questions about the ownership and control of our digital world.\u00a0 The relatively unknown, cyber-security firm…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":460,"featured_media":17206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1648],"tags":[3186,3185],"class_list":["post-17212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","tag-crowdstrike","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/460"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/crow1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n