We’ve seen the future — its name is CrowdStrike: Joe Bennett

We have become hopelessly dependent on electronic systems, Joe Bennett says, as the recent global technical outage showed. Photo / Herald staff

Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.

OPINION

Until last week, I hadn’t heard of CrowdStrike. If I’d had to guess I’d have said it was a security company, providing guards for events. And I’d have been half-right. CrowdStrike is indeed a security company, but the security it offers is not flesh and blood. It’s virtual, electronic, intangible. CrowdStrike holds your hand and offers to walk you safely through the jungle of the internet.

No one inventor or owner or country or organisation has overseen the creation of the internet, so, instead of being built, it has evolved, endlessly shaped and reshaped by a billion separate wills and urges. As a result it is a messy mirror of the human species, a busy, inventive place with an intense interest in sex and money. And because there is no government of the internet — or no effective one at any rate — there is no single set of laws to run it, nor any authority with the power to enforce such laws as do exist. In short, it’s a society with few police. And with few police comes crime.

In the anonymity of cyberspace, scammers, hackers and fraudsters abound, all trying to worm into our electronic lives to steal our money, our secrets, our identities. We’ve all come across them. We may have lost stuff to them. But there are big-time crooks as well, bad actors in the international scene, backed by governments that are less than virtuous. CrowdStrike has specialised in identifying them. The nationalities are no surprise. They’ve caught the North Koreans doing dirty work, and the Chinese, and inevitably, the Russians.

So CrowdStrike is a force for good on the internet, though just like everyone else it’s driven by self-interest and charges plenty for its services. The company is worth several billion dollars, or at least it was. Then last week it had a moment to regret. Let Wikipedia take up the story.

“On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike released a software update to the vulnerability scanner Falcon Sensor. Flaws in the update caused blue screens of death on Microsoft Windows machines, disrupting millions of Windows computers worldwide. Affected machines were forced into a bootloop, making them unusable. This was caused by an update to a configuration file, Channel File 291, which CrowdStrike says triggered a logic error and caused the operating system to crash. The downtime caused a widespread global impact …”

There’s poetry here, poetry that couldn’t have been written 50 years ago: the blue screens of death, the bootloop of unusability. This is the language of electronic apocalypse and all from an update to a single file, a few lines of programmer code, code that spelt the word catastrophe.

Planes were grounded, banks shut, hospitals paralysed. Office workers around the world sat staring at screens as blue and empty as a summer sky, and customers in New Zealand supermarkets had to put their dinner back on the shelves because they had no way to pay for it.

I saw an interview with the CEO of CrowdStrike the following day. To say he looked a broken man is to understate things. The interviewer had to give him time to compose himself, to drink water, to recover the power of speech. For he had almost torn down the world.

As it turned out, the problem was fixable, and we have all moved on and forgotten about it. But that so small a lapse could cause so much disruption should surely make us pause. It could have been so much worse. But I doubt we’ll heed the warning. Just as we have become hopelessly dependent on fossil fuel, so we have become hopelessly dependent on electronic systems. And we are far more interested in sex and money than in reading the writing on the wall, however fresh the paint and large the letters.

CrowdStrike meant no ill. Indeed the opposite. But as Philip Larkin knew ...

Most things are never meant. This won’t be, most likely; … greeds. And garbage are too thick-strewn… I just think it will happen, soon.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a bootloop. You have to laugh.