The Microsoft/CrowdStrike outage shows the danger of monopolization

As the world recovers from the largest IT outage in history, it shows the danger of one point of failure in IT infrastructure

A global IT failure wreaked havoc on Friday, grounding flights and disrupting everything from hospitals to government agencies. Over all the chaos hung a question: how did a flawed update to Microsoft Windows software bring large swaths of society to a screeching halt?

The problem originated with an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, relied upon by most of the global technology industry, including Microsoft, for its Falcon program, which blocks the execution of malware and cyber-attacks. Falcon protects devices by securing access to a wide range of internal systems and automatically updating its defenses - a level of integration that means if Falcon falters, the computer is close behind. After CrowdStrike updated Falcon on Thursday night, Microsoft systems and Windows PCs were hit with a blue screen of death" and rendered unusable as they were trapped in a recovery boot loop.