Microsoft outage and digital monopolies

The global Microsoft/CrowdStrike outage is yet another indication that our technological world, in the era of digital monopolies, is a house of cards awaiting a windstorm. The Big Five of the tech industry – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft – have built monopolies that virtually all economic and human activities now depend on, at a global scale, with runaway profits and little to no accountability for their failures.

 

As evident today, our dependency on monopolies such as Microsoft has also resulted in the creation of massive sites of vulnerabilities, where a malfunction or an attack at one site can result in consequences that are much wider and deeper than ever before, impacting millions of lives. A simple malfunction in one mundane software update by a contractor, in this case that of CrowdStrike, has resulted in disruptions of global proportions afflicting everything, from transport to banking and healthcare.

 

What we need are not centralized for-profit infrastructures of capitalism that hold the economy hostage and offer neither security nor reliability, Instead, we need open software and a technological culture that promotes decentralized tools, which are designed to support human activities instead of restricting or monetizing them.  

 

This is neither the first nor the last of the outages. It is very reminiscent of the 2022 Rogers outage in the telecommunications sector, where a configuration error during a network upgrade brought much of the Canadian state including emergency services, temporarily, to a standstill. At a smaller scale, it is also reminiscent of the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in the United States, where the FBI stood helplessly watching as a hacker group was able to extract 4.4 million US dollars from the oil company after simply holding their nation-wide computerized network hostage for a few hours.