Parmy Olson, Columnist

CrowdStrike’s Global Outage Doesn’t Have to Be a Recurring Nightmare

Widespread catastrophic failure is inevitable when companies are so reliant on just a few dominant cloud vendors.

July 19, 2024 at 2:29 PM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Chaos.
Photographer: David Ramos/Getty Images Europe

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One of the most disturbing things about Friday’s devastating global outage of IT systems is how routine such ruinous events have become.

In the last few years, similar glitches from companies like Amazon.com Inc. have temporarily shut down systems across the globe, and this latest issue comes as a result of a botched software update from cyber security firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., whose link to mega customer Microsoft Corp. has led to worldwide problems — including chaos in airports, stock exchanges and hospitals, though a fix has now been deployed.