I buy a plane ticket online, and my phone knows what time it leaves and reminds me about it on the day, with no additional input from me – amazing. It’s the middle of winter and I have to drive, and rather than brave those first few minutes when the car feels like a butcher’s freezer before the heating system gets a chance to warm it up, I use an app to make it nice and toasty a few minutes before I get inside. That’s cool, dude. I’m a diabetic, and instead of pricking my finger for the Nth time today to check my blood sugar, worrying about the cookie I ate, I get real time information beamed from a sensor on my arm to my phone to let me know if I’m over-indulging – I am FutureMan™, master of my universe.
…Except when it all comes crashing down. As we’ve grown reliant on electronic systems for managing our daily lives, the devices and networks they run on can and do fail, sometimes with serious consequences. There were enough examples in the past year for the tech news outlet CIO to compile a list of them (some funny, some serious, others somewhere in between), exposing how fragile the systems on which we’ve come to depend can be.
Chief among these is the infamous CrowdStrike debacle from July, when the U.S.-based cybersecurity firm sent out an update to its clients that reportedly caused 8.5 million computers running its Falcon software to become, in the words of CIO’s Grant Gross, “pretty much useless, beyond serving as door stops or paperweights.” Given the breadth of clients served by CrowdStrike, which includes nearly 60% of Fortune 500 companies, outages affected large swathes of unrelated sectors, from air transport to finance to healthcare. The total cost to clients using their Falcon software is estimated at $5.4 billion, according to the insurance firm Parametrix, with only around a tenth of that thought to be insured. CrowdStrike includes a clause in its contracts limiting liability to “fees paid” for clients, which essentially amounts to a refund. Experts believe that larger companies with the resources to lawyer up may have negotiated better deals.
CrowdStrike’s epic fail left many Chief Information Officers in affected companies to “rethink their dependence on cloud infrastructure” according to Gross, but if his list is anything to go by, internal software solutions are no panacea. The last story on his list of IT disasters is that of the British Post Office’s ongoing scandal involving its Horizon accounting software, developed by Fujitsu. Between 1999 (the year the software was adopted) and 2015, over 900 employees of the Post Office were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud, and false accounting based on the faulty calculations made by the software. Thousands more were also affected, with some being forced to cover budget shortfalls (caused by Horizon!) with their own money, or being wrongly terminated from their positions.
As early as 1999, employees of the Post Office were flagging problems with Horizon, and Fujitsu reportedly knew of them as well, but the British government kept these issues under wraps during civil and criminal cases against the affected public servants. Only 100 of the convictions have been overturned as of February this year, although those convicted or otherwise affected (over 2,000 people) are eligible for compensation, which is expected to cost the government over £1 billion. The kicker? The Post Office tried to ditch the Horizon system last year for a cloud-based solution, an apparently failed attempt that cost £31 million. The openly faulty Horizon software will remain part of the Post Office until at least March of next year, with Fujitsu stating that it will “voluntarily” decline to bid for an extension.
ITV helped return the issue into the spotlight this year with a critically acclaimed four-part miniseries, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Maybe the scandal will last long enough to warrant a sequel?
