BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – A Texas A&M computer science expert says major companies are still recovering after last Friday’s CrowdStrike failure.
According to an insurance analysis published Wednesday, the CrowdStrike software glitch that grounded flights and caused system outages for companies around the world will reportedly cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses.
Martin Carlisle with the Texas A&M Department of Computer Science and Engineering joined First News at Four. He told KBTX he wasn’t aware of an outage of this scale previously.
“The cybersecurity software from CrowdStrike lives deep in the operating system. So, when it has a problem, it takes down the entire machine. It’s much different than if you had a problem with, say, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Outlook,” explained Carlisle.
The issue quickly sparked online jokes of Y2K panic, and Carlisle said he hoped this would never happen again.
“One of the problems that we have in the IT sector is you want to use single vendors because then you have less training cost, you have less maintenance cost. But when you use single vendors like CrowdStrike and something bad happens, then you’ve lost everything,” Carlisle said.
For the future, the computer science expert said regulation would key to ensure the problem isn’t repeated.
“You have to think about regulation. You have to think about, ‘can we force companies to do better testing things of that sort? Can we make sure that they pay when they make mistakes that impact other people,’” added Carlisle.
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