"Krone" commentary

Computer glitch: everything stood still

Taking stock for the "Krone": Dr. Georg Wailand

(Bild: stock.adobe.com, Krone KREATIV)

I was lucky: my flight from Amsterdam to Vienna on Saturday worked, a day earlier I would have been stuck in chaos with thousands of others. Nothing worked, a faulty update from the security company CrowdStrike plunged the world into chaos. Airports were paralyzed, millions of passengers around the globe were stranded and the airlines were at a loss.

But that was by no means all: operations had to be canceled, ambulances closed, pharmacies could no longer access prescriptions from GPs, ATMs stopped dispensing money and shoppers in supermarkets were urged to pay in cash because cards were no longer working. Even fully automated car factories came to a standstill, in short: the biggest computer breakdown to date had fatal consequences in individual countries around the world and in individual industries. Fortunately, the mega-breakdown was resolved step by step after a few hours. The damage is likely to run into the billions. The grotesque thing is that the catastrophe was triggered by a system that was supposed to provide greater security.

What does this incident teach us? Without realizing it, we live in a totally networked world. Even a small mistake can cause an entire data pyramid to collapse. The IT disaster has shown just how fragile the global network is.