Within hours of waking up to yesterday's news of the CrowdStrike debacle at Microsoft, pundits were already calling it the biggest IT fail in history.
The impact of the outage, said to be caused by a security update from CrowdStrike that caused a problem with Microsoft's Windows, has been felt around the globe with companies from airlines and broadcasters to health providers and banks suffering significant disruption. At the time of writing, it remains unclear how long it might take to fully rectify the situation.
For those with a long enough memory, one commentator summed it up succinctly: "This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it's actually happened this time."
The London Stock Exchange Group was among those hit, knocking out its Regulatory News Service for several hours before it could be restored. Securities trading wasn't affected, but there was an impact on spot and forward rates on currencies.
READ MORE: Global IT outage could last for 'some time' as problems continue
But the overall reaction by financial markets around the globe was clear and predictable, with share prices down across the board as the impact of system failures ripped through the business world.
The chief executive of US-based CrowdStrike, which detects incoming cyber attacks and has a roughly 24% share of the cyber security market, has apologised for the software bug that triggered the "blue screen of death" on computers running on Windows.
This, however, will be of little consolation to beleaguered travellers on what was set to be the busiest day for departures from the UK since October 2019. Some 3,000 flights had been cancelled by mid-afternoon yesterday, with that number growing by the hour.
Major tech companies were hit as well, with Meta platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down for extended periods leading to an estimated economic loss of more than $160 million per hour. Its stock fell amid investor concerns about the operational and reputational damage caused.
READ MORE: Edinburgh Airport issues warning over Microsoft IT outage
Banks, brokers and financial technology companies were also hit hard, leaving some traders unable to access their systems in order to process trades. UK financial regulators have reportedly already begun speaking with financial services companies to assess the extent of the damage to banks and payment companies.
A lot of tough questions are going to be asked in the coming weeks and months about the business world's computing systems as this incident has highlighted how reliant the global economy is on a handful of major tech companies to run vital infrastructure.
"When one service provider in the digital supply chain is affected, the whole chain can break, causing large-scale outages," said Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at US-based professional IT association ISACA.
READ MORE: Calls for emergency COBRA meeting amid mass IT outage
"This incident is a clear example of what could be termed a digital pandemic, a single point of failure impacting millions of lives globally."
Histrionic fears of a "global economic meltdown" aside, the cost of this debacle is going to mount up very high indeed and will take some time to calculate, if ever. Given the scale of the outage, we can expect a fair bit of continuing volatility when markets re-open on Monday.
With an oligopoly of powerful technology companies running most of the world that we live in, the time has come for individuals, businesses and governments to think more on how to build back-ups and diversification into their IT systems.
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