Online Services Outages

The outage today, 19/07/2024, to do with Microsoft and Crowdstrike was probably cloud related. It’s the old problem of resilience, with limited alternative avenues. Everybody having their own storage and their own access for things, allowed for with distributed services. Clouds are extremely centralised, so if there are problems you lose the lot, airlines, rail companies, banks and card payment systems, media, healthcare as you cater for high advancement, efficiency and cost, but build in almost certain failures through systemic collapse. And this is even without intentional espionage as a possibility, a big problem in today’s political environment. In our modern world of interconnected, interrelated and interdependent systems having little diversity the chance for such cascade failures grows larger each day. This was a short affair, so time cascades didn’t come into play, and will probably be shrugged off by firms that want to increase the control and dependencies even further for just their own companies financial gains, such as subscription only services.