Rob Pettefar, Swindon Socialist Party and tech worker in Unite the Union
The costs are still being counted from the catastrophic Crowdstrike global IT outage, with an estimate of $5 billion in lost business so far. With the impact on the NHS and other health and emergency services unknown, a number of lives will have been lost too. But what happened?
The direct problem was a bad configuration for a sensor working at the deep level of the Windows operating system. Being at such a fundamental level, this required some technical know-how and largely manual procedures to fix. The problem only affected businesses and large organisation, as the Crowdstrike security software is largely a business-level security package.
For an update like this, to systems being run by so many critical infrastructure organisations, you would expect a gradual delivery so that problems can be identified early and the roll-out halted. This didn’t happen. It also happened on a Friday, a day usually avoided for large software updates due to most staff going home over the weekend.
Crowdstrike bosses themselves have said that there was a bug in their testing software that allowed the misconfiguration to pass. Clearly no local testing of the update was performed however, which points to huge holes in the testing and quality assurance procedures. A similar problem in April took down machines running a different operating system, Linux.
Microsoft, which runs the windows operating system, has been allowed to monopolise critical global infrastructure, with companies and governments incentivised by business costs alone.
Having trusted, well-staffed and funded IT departments means better risk mitigation practices can limit the impact of problems and mean a faster recovery when something eventually does happen. With businesses focused on the bottom line, and governments always looking to cut funding, most organisations see IT as merely a cost to be reduced and outsourced.
Thousands are being laid off in the tech industry globally as rising interest rates bite and bosses axe jobs to save costs. In government, technical expertise is ignored and overlooked while millions is wasted on consultants, with technology changes imposed in a top-down bureaucratic manner.
The capitalist system has shown the limits of its capability to push technology in a direction valuable to the rest of society. Self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, Non-Fungible Tokens, the ‘metaverse’, the gig economy and now generative AI; the tech industry is ridden with speculation.
The tech sector has long been one of the least unionised sectors. But with the recent ‘wall-to-wall’ unionisation of the Bethesda computer game studio and the emerging of tech sections of larger unions, things are starting to change. Tech workers getting organised can begin to hold the tech bosses to account. But it is by workers having a democratic say over how things are run that the existing advances in technology can be rolled out for the benefit of the whole of society. That means nationalising the big tech firms under democratic workers’ control and management, with no compensation
