‘It will happen again,’ Ga. expert says of tech meltdown

AUGUSTA, Ga. – This week, a computer glitch wasn’t just an irritation.

The defective update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crippled some hospitals, 911 call centers, businesses, travelers and institutions using Microsoft Windows worldwide and across the CSRA.

Even a day after the problem happened, the domino effect continued to ground travelers at Augusta Regional Airport.

It wasn’t the first time an anti-virus manufacturer has released a bad update. But it is the first time the error has been seen on a massive scale — and it will happen again, according to Andy Green, assistant professor of information security and assurance at Kennesaw State University.

On Saturday, Green said CrowdStrike had a solid reputation before the incident, but failures are inevitable.

“We’ve really come to put these organizations in a position where they have to produce zero-defect software,” he said. “And that’s a heavy ask for anybody.”

The CrowdStrike outage was particularly difficult on engineers because several systems were left in an inoperable “blue screen of death.” In this condition, somebody has to manually reboot each computer, which could take 10 to 15 minutes per individual system, according to Green.

The outage also knocked out servers, which needed to be brought back online.

“Depending on the number of impacted systems, you could see an organization that’s already back up and running fully, or organizations that are looking at weeks for recovery time to get their hands on these impacted systems,” Green said.

Given the outage’s severity, companies should have an emergency repair plan in place, according to Green.

“This has happened before. It will happen again. And eventually, everything will recover,” he said.

Copyright 2024 WRDW/WAGT. All rights reserved.