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This articleauthorChe Pinjueis a director of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, a visiting associate professor at the School of Chinese Business at the University of Hong Kong, a senior consultant at Alibaba Cloud, and writes a column for Hong Kong Economic Journal“Big Data for All”.
Last Friday, Microsoft’s system was implicated in a third-party software, causing a global technical outage. According to reports, the operations of airlines, banks, medical, payment services and media organizations were severely affected.
After the failure, service recovery progressed slowly. I was at Hong Kong Airport at the time and saw chaos in the self-service check-in area, crowds of people, long queues, and flight cancellations or delays. Fortunately, my flight was not affected. According to data, more than 5,000 flights were canceled worldwide, accounting for 4.6% of scheduled flights, which is more serious than expected.
Major European airports such as Berlin, Germany, and Delta Airlines in the United States temporarily suspended all flights. Sky News in the UK reported that the failure caused the morning news broadcast to be interrupted, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation also encountered a similar dilemma. There were problems with the payment system of supermarkets in Australia, and the customer service of many companies was paralyzed. The cybersecurity company involved, CrowdStrike, admitted that its antivirus software update caused the problem and has tried its best to fix the software error. However, I think it is unimaginable that there is no quick recovery solution for security software with such a big impact.
This technical failure has caused a deep reflection on the vulnerability of information technology systems. First of all, it reminds us that the world’s high dependence on information technology systems has become an indisputable fact, which has brought about systemic risks that cannot be ignored. For enterprises and governments, maintaining the stability of IT (information technology) systems is a top priority, which requires increased investment and high attention, and has far-reaching significance for the future development of digitalization.
Today, emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are increasingly penetrating into all walks of life. This undoubtedly makes us worry about whether the testing and regulatory measures for these new technologies are sufficient, and how to ensure security and stability in terms of technology updates and system maintenance. What role should the government play?
Going a step further, similar situations can also happen to data-driven companies. From my experience, even within the same company, data errors can cause large-scale system paralysis. The cause can easily be data problems provided by third parties, but customers often naturally blame the platform, just like last week’s incident, when Microsoft was mentioned far more often than CrowdStrike.
The author believes that the risks and challenges brought about by data errors are more difficult to capture and prevent, and therefore it is more worthy for companies to learn from them and take precautions.
Finally, I would like to emphasize that the government’s supervision of platforms should never be taken lightly. In the digital age, people are increasingly dependent on technology, and even if they stay at home, they are inevitably affected by it.
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