A widespread Microsoft IT outage started early this morning, and
it's impacting businesses around the world.
Hospitals, some broadcasters and airlines are among those seeing disruptions.
Pearson and Vancouver International Airports both reporting some delays as
US Customs and Border Protection is also experiencing issues with
its technology systems.
So for some more insight, let's welcome tech analyst Carmi
Levy to the program right now, joining us from London
ON.
Good morning, Carmi, thanks again.
Great to be with you, Candace.
So we know Microsoft is one of the largest computer
and software companies in the world, and some people might
not realize how woven into the fabric of these industries
its systems are.
Can you give us an idea of how big it
really is, and also of how reliant on this tech
we are?
Well, Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in
the world.
So many of us have computers running Windows in our
homes, in our offices.
But Windows also runs in the data centers that provide
the web services, the apps, the online services that we
rely on.
So when you book an airline ticket, it's going through
technology like this at the back end.
And so there is a company that Microsoft Works with,
they're called Crowdstrike, and they have a piece, they're a
cybersecurity company.
They have a piece of software, Falcon Sensor, that had
a bad software update.
And so it affected all of these computers.
It rolled out, all of these computers are now crashed
and they could not restart themselves.
They were in an endless loop, which means that all
the services that rely on these were not available.
And as a result, it cascaded around the world, probably
the most global of all global outages that I've seen
in my career, all because a common system that we
all use and we're probably never even aware of underpin
just about every digital activity that we can do in
the course of a given day.
You mentioned a bad software update at the root of
all of this.
Do we have any idea what caused the, the bad
the bad to it?
Yeah.
So normally when when you plan a software update, you
you update, you test it in a test environment.
So it's not out in the real world.
It's you.
You can break it.
Anything can happen.
It's, you know, you, you test a plane without passengers
on it first to make sure that it's safe to
fly.
You do the same thing with software.
And unfortunately it was not tested as well as it
probably should have been before it rolled out to the
world.
There was a, a, a, a fault that they did
not detect.
And usually what happens then is there should be backups,
there should be fail safe, there should be workarounds, processes
that kick in that even if there is a problem,
it keeps the services going.
So the software was bad, it wasn't detected, wasn't properly
tested.
And then the backups that would have protected us from
that also did not kick in.
So obviously a chain of events, all, you know, negative
that kicked in to contribute to this and we're going
to be learning from this and hopefully the technology that
underpins this will get better from those learnings.
We always learn from disasters like this.
This one will be no exception.
So it sounds like you just kind of outlined the
best way to protect against this type of outage, although
it is, you know, very high level, just try and
try again and and have those fail safes in place.
Exactly.
And you know, as far, you know, for the regular
end user, there's really nothing that we can do to
keep companies from Microsoft from having outages.
But what we can do individually is to have Plan
B, the company that you work for probably has disaster
recovery plans and business continuity plans on the books so
that when technology A isn't available, what do we do?
How do we keep the business running?
So look at your own household, look at your own
day-to-day, how you use digital technologies and ask yourself, if
windows weren't available, if I didn't have, I have my
smartphone here, if the app didn't work suddenly, what would
I do?
What's my, what's my alternative approach?
Think about what happens when your technology fails so that
next time you're not just sitting there twiddling your thumbs.
There is, you know, we, we can protect ourselves better.
We can't protect, we can't stop this from happening out
in the world, but we can certainly give ourselves options
if we give it a little bit of thought.
And before we let you go, Carmi, you know US
Border Protection, we're talking flights and airlines.
What are the vulnerabilities that are present now that this
they are experiencing this and, and there's really no timeline
on when it will be solved.
So, you know, right now they're saying that they are
rolling out, they're backing out of the update.
So the, the, the bad software that's out there, they
are in fact correcting it, moving us back in time
to the moment before that software update was originally rolled
out.
So that will take a few hours, obviously, because it's
so global in nature.
There are a lot of computers to hit, a lot
of data centers to touch.
So this will take a while.
It'll probably take a little bit longer to handle the
backlog of work that is not happening, the airline tickets
that weren't issued, the hospital bookings that didn't happen.
You know, the border crossings, the cars snaked up behind
it, behind the border.
And so that will take hours, if not days to
resolve.
And then, of course, we're probably still going to be
discovering things, well, you know, well into next week because
that's just the way things normally work.
They're so interconnected, so many different technologies that are at
play here that it's not just like rebooting 1 computer.
You're rebooting millions of them.
And that's going to take time.
OK, Well, thanks again for your insight.
That is our tech analyst, Carmi Levy, joining us today.
Have a great day.