How one flawed software update could have such widespread effects — and cost “potentially billions of dollars”

CrowdStrike’s security software is running on countless individual computers all around the globe — which means the update that got pushed to those devices caused them all to shut down, virtually simultaneously.

And in today’s networked economy, an outage in one part of a supply chain can cause domino effects up and down the line. When multiple parts of a supply chain go down, it touches off a cascade of problems.

Some affected machines may be rarely serviced by people or located in remote areas. Others may not even have monitors or keyboards plugged in, because they don’t regularly require humans to directly interact with them.

The most extreme examples may include weather monitoring sensors or devices in railway signal boxes, Andrew Peck, a cybersecurity expert at Loughborough University in the UK, said, which could require technicians to physically visit potentially hundreds of thousands of machines to perform the recovery process.

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