Many, if not all, of us were affected in the past week by a faulty software update from CrowdStrike. My wife and son ended up having to drive home from Eastern Tennessee rather than fly because their flight was canceled just hours before it was scheduled to take off. Thankfully, that was the extent of impact on us, but others were more adversely affected. Airlines were one of the most-prominently impacted by the glitch, but they were definitely not the only industry that had to deal with systems crashing. And there is no shortage of experts pinning the outage on a failure of process when the software update was rolled out.
Following best-practices and protocols for implementing software updates are certainly important for a bug-free process. In the end, it comes down to people. You can have the best protocols to implement and update software, but successful execution depends on people and what they do.
But last week's outage has highlighted the issue of company and societal vulnerabilities, due to the extent to which cloud computing services are controlled by a small number of providers.
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