What happens when 8.5 million computers crash at once?
Posted July 24, 2024 8:09 am.
Last Updated July 24, 2024 9:00 am.
In today’s The Big Story podcast, last Friday, a bad update from a cybersecurity company managed to give an estimated one per cent of the world’s computers the blue screen of death. The global impact was profound, grounding airlines, halting businesses and generally providing a wake-up call to everyone who takes the digital infrastructure most of our lives are built on for granted.
Jesse Hirsh is a futurist, technologist and cybersecurity expert. “All of the sudden, no one knows what to do, because we’re a brittle society, we don’t have the resilience, we don’t have the protocols to say, ‘what happens if we have a catastrophic computer failure, what do we do then?’” says Hirsh.
Why weren’t we prepared for this? How did it happen? And are we really ready for a world that could go offline at any moment?
