Sometimes, disruption is not innovation.
Last month’s CrowdStrike incident was preventable. Even though the company claims to have testing protocols, it still managed to release buggy software in an automated update that caused tremendous damage and inconvenience to thousands of people. There are many factors that contributed to this mistake, and some of them have to do with people, assumptions, and misapplied startup culture.
The computerized systems that run most of the world we depend on (shipping, rail and air freight, flights, hospitals, banks, governments, and emergency services, etc.) all have operating systems with specific configurations, and many of these machine configurations are not standardized to each other. Because they are heterogeneous, they do not run, fail, or stay intact in standardized ways. There are different vendors for different needs, machines, industries, and preferences. And within those contexts, even when the same software is used, there are different versions of the same software. A lot of that software relies on automated updates. With the Crowdsource fiasco, we saw what happens if one of those automated updates go wrong.