“We are dependent on one company.” It was the first global technology blackout

CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor antivirus update caused a global outage of Microsoft systems that had the tool installed. Individual users and large companies had problems.

It looks like we’re dealing with a true global blackout for the first time

– comments Grzegorz Dróżdż, analyst at Conotoxia.

The global outage has shown our dependence on large companies

“What previously seemed like a science fiction fantasy has become a reality, revealing the fragility of modern technological systems. This incident has made us realize how dependent we are on a single technology company and how serious the consequences of a failure of such an entity on such a scale can be,” Grzegorz Dródż continues.

“This is a perfect example of what Nassim Taleb describes as a ‘black swan’. The disruptions affected not only individual users, but primarily large institutions such as banks (including central banks), stock exchanges, airports, paralyzing operations during the peak holiday season and causing chaos in many other sectors,” the expert notes.

In another comment sent to our editorial mailbox, Kamil Sadkowski, an analyst at the ESET antivirus laboratory, echoes Drój: “This type of situation is certainly not the last. The more we rely on technological solutions, the more often we can expect them to fail in certain situations. Considering that a large part of the economy uses and relies on a small group of global software and service providers, an error introduced by one such global provider can cause a number of widespread problems in various sectors of the economy.”

Stock market reacts to Windows system failure. Microsoft and CrowdStrike lose

“Warren Buffett once said that it takes years to build trust in a brand and only a moment to lose it. Microsoft’s shares on the German stock exchange fell by more than 2 percent, while CrowdStrike, which confirmed that the problem affected its Falcon Sensor software, fell by almost 14 percent. Although the failure was quickly identified and fixed, shares of CrowdStrike’s competitors gained as much as 6 percent in pre-market trading,” writes Dróżdż.

“The decline in Microsoft’s shares and many other companies affected by the blackout will likely have a negative impact on the quotations of the main US indices, because Microsoft, the world’s second largest company in terms of capitalization, has a share of as much as 8.7 percent in the Nasdaq 100 index and 7 percent in the S&P 500 index,” the expert concluded.