Global IT Outage - Who Escaped?

“Hundreds of flights cancelled.”

“Airports across the globe shut down.”

“Banking operations hit badly.”

“Airports, ATMs, banks and hospitals impacted worldwide.”

Screamed the headlines of major print and electronic media worldwide on 19^th and 20^th July 2024. See the picture below courtesy The Guardian.

This is not sci-fi. It is for real. Most countries in America, Europe and south east Asia were affected by the IT outage caused by the crash of Windows operating system designed by Microsoft. As reported, 8.5 million devices running Windows software were affected globally. Did any country escape the crash?

Who Escaped the Outage?

Reports indicate that the operations at Beijing and Shanghai airports in China were not affected by the outage. Of course, the news reports from Chinese agencies are to be taken with a pinch of salt. Yet the point to note is that China depends on home-grown tech infrastructure both for hardware and software. And if China succeeded in being unaffected by the current outage, then the credit goes to their planners and enforcers of building a robust IT infrastructure which is not dependent upon foreign technology. Be it the operating system (like Windows of Microsoft which crashed worldwide), hardware or the cloud technology, China seems to have it all! Such home-grown technologies were then used for critical sectors like banking, defence, airlines etc by China. Is there a lesson for other Nations?

However, what did crash in China were the foreign businesses because they must have been using non-Chinese origin hardware and software. The Windows crash thus affected such businesses in China too.

There is general skepticism about the quality of Chinese goods. But here is a case in point. Do they have separate Standards for design, development and deployment of systems for core sectors? And such Standards must be forbidding the use of overseas technology. Is there a lesson for other Nations?

The Outage and India

The airports in India were also badly affected by the outage. However, as reported in the media, the national infrastructure managed by the NIC was not affected. Once again, kudos to the planners of NIC and similar tech-infrastructure for defence, space, atomic energy and other sectors for successfully thwarting the recent outage.

Intentional Cyber Attacks

The recent outage may have been accidental due to a third-party software update. However, what prevents ‘bad’ actors and rogue nations from intentional attacks that can cripple other nations? It is for this reason that the designers of mission critical systems in India and other countries have always developed their own ‘kernels’ and interfaces which prevent cyber breakthrough. Ghumakkad has personal experience in the design of such mission-critical systems. All such systems have to be isolated from the internet as China has demonstrated. May be the current global outage is a wakeup call to carry out an in-depth audit of our dependence on overseas technologies.

This post is not to be taken as promoting China. It is to highlight the need for ground-up technology development for mission critical systems. With today’s technology, any commercially available hardware or software can be crippled at will. If any nation wants to survive such attacks in future, it has to deploy home-grown technology including hardware, software and the cloud.

Developing operating systems (to counter the 3rd party and other outages of products like Windows) is not easy but neither is to ensure the security of the national assets of a country!

Hope the world learns a lesson or two form this IT outage.

Thanks for browsing.

   - Harsh-the-Ghumakkad/ Secunderabad/21st July 2024

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