Crowdstrike Outage Shows Systemic Risks
One of the Youtube influencers I’m following talks about “the coming blackouts”. Sounds over-the-top conspiracy paranoid. Well, not so fast.
The massive IT disruption we’re now seeing, has systemic causes, argues Ed Zitron (Zitron 2024):
What we’re seeing today isn’t just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder.
I can add to that: the growth-at-all-costs and-damn-the-consequences mentality he describes, is not just a mentality. It’s a structural feature of late stage capitalism we find ourselves in. It’s the same growthism that drives the climate catastrophe.
It’s this same trend that leads to some of Luis Suarez’s darker visions, in which climate disruption and IT crashes coincide, making “the office” both unreachable and kaput. Resulting in a dystopian world, in which distributed work is the most viable and resilient mode. Over the top? It’s already happening.
There’s a link to #AI here as well. It’s the new shiny object, that gobbles up all investment. Meanwhile proper engineering and QA fall by the wayside.
This is dangerous, and also a dark warning for the future. Do you think that Facebook, or Microsoft, or Google — all of whom have laid off over 10,000 people in the last year — have done so in a conscientious way that means that the people left understand how their systems run and their inherent issues? Do you think that the management-types obsessed with the unsustainable AI boom are investing heavily in making sure their organizations are rigorously protected against, say, one bad line of code? Do they even know who wrote the code of their current systems? Is that person still there? If not, is that person at least contracted to make sure that something nuanced about the system in question isn’t mistakenly removed?
The answer to all those questions is: no.
And it’s not just American corporations, who exhibit this suicidal tendency. Just two days before the Crowdstrike outage hit, news emerged that the EU’s 2025 Horizon investment programme scrapped funding for fundamental internet infrastructure. Because the money will be spent on AI instead.
In the past year, we’ve already seen a massive security incident, caused by systemic reliance on underfunded digital infrastructure components that are maintained by open source volunteers. The writing is on the wall.