Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
Global IT outage is latest crisis to highlight need for greater resilience
By Andrew Hammond
The first quarter of the 21st century has seen a succession of disparate international crises, from the Sept. 11 terror attacks to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, July 19 global IT outage highlights the potential for a new era of cyber challenges in the coming years.
The worst of what has been the largest global IT outage event has now passed, eclipsing all previous similar events. However, it is not yet over, with potentially millions more computers across the world still needing to be fixed individually.
Microsoft estimates that the mass IT outage worldwide affected 8.5 million Windows devices. Banks, supermarkets and other major institutions, including transport hubs like airports, saw services disrupted, while many businesses were unable to take digital payments or access key databases.
The closest IT outage event before this was the WannaCry cyber attack in 2017, estimated to have impacted around 300,000 computers in 150 countries. There was a similar costly and disruptive attack called NotPetya a month later.
While the outage that struck Friday was, therefore, the biggest IT global challenge so far, the potential for even bigger disruption can be seen in estimates that less than 1% of all Windows machines worldwide were impacted. Governments and businesses across the globe need to collaborate more on fixing the flaws responsible for the outage.
These different events, from Friday's global IT outage to the pandemic and the global financial crisis, show that greater resilience is needed to mitigate the uncertainty of contemporary hazards.
The concept of resilience is not new. Yet, it is now more important than ever, in large part because globalization has rendered so much of the world increasingly interdependent and potentially vulnerable. The threats and opportunities we face are seamless, running across the boundaries of defense, foreign affairs and domestic and social life.
Driven by advances in transport, communications and electronic networks, globalization over the last three decades has delivered opportunities in terms of mobility, movement and exchange of people, ideas, values, resources, commodities and finance. Yet, this process and associated technology have also brought new threats or intensified existing ones, including terrorism, cyberattacks, pandemics and financial crises.
The degree of instability and uncertainty accompanying this high measure of international interdependence may now mean that crises are recurrent — and thus the rule rather than the exception. The sheer mass of information engulfing decision-makers can have a paralyzing effect. And the speed with which threats spread may be magnified in proportion to the degree of interdependence.
We need look no further than the COVID-19 pandemic which may have begun in Wuhan, China. Or indeed, the financial crisis that cascaded from the U.S. financial sector to see globalization in practice.
This bias toward instability is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of the potential crises we face is constantly evolving. Take the example of international terrorism, where much more sophisticated threats than the Sept. 11 attacks are growing involving nuclear, biological and radiological devices whose transportation has been facilitated by global networks.
The fact that crises are recurrent and constantly evolving means it is essential to continually upgrade our capacity to deal with them by identifying, exposing and remedying our deficiencies. Many share this relatively uncontroversial ambition, but much more is needed to deliver on it, including bold international leadership.
During the global financial crisis, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown used the presidency of the Group of 20 to deliver an approximately $1 trillion coordinated stimulus package. Brown, who is credited by some with staving off a second Great Depression, believes similar acts of international coordination are now required to tackle future crises.
Yet, to the degree that resilience can ever be said to have depended on elites at the top of organisations, this is no longer the case — hence the need to bring together practitioners from the public, private and third sectors with other stakeholders, including academics, in order to combine theory and practice in targeted projects. Such partnership working is also paramount because of the scale and diversity of the challenges we face.
If we are to be able to keep up, potentially be one step ahead of future challenges and potentially seize new opportunities too, we will need to pool our ingenuity to innovate and deliver solutions. Ironically, while today's threats are new, in a sense what we are looking for is a recall of the past, including during the World War II at institutions like the United Kingdom's Bletchley Park.
Just as innovators and key institutions working together were vital to meeting the risks of yesteryear, we must now pool our skills and expertise in our battles against contemporary menaces like IT outages. The goal must be nothing less than ensuring that we can not only cope but flourish in the increasingly uncertain times we live in.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.