By While the year 2024 was supposed to be the year of AI revolutionizing everything, a number of critical glitches in the world of technology have shaken to the very core just how dependent we really are upon it. On July 19th, one of these major failures occurred: a critical CrowdStrike error caused an outage of all Microsoft Windows systems. A wrong software update caused the glitch that hit about 8.5 million devices worldwide, stopping business, government, and private activities because of the effect. Among the rippling effects were dead 911 lines in a number of U.S. states and temporary grounding of flights by American carriers. This in turn caused a stock price crash for both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, with their respective shares falling to $437.1 and about $305, respectively, meaning the attack had caused huge financial and reputational damage.
These technology ills later continued in July when the SIX Swiss Exchange suffered a technical failure, stopping trading for several hours on July 31. That also saw the SMI, the main index from SIX, slide 3.6% on Decust 2—just to show how one single failure in financial technology can result in considerable market volatility and operational problems. In a similar vein, on Decust 28, 2024, the Dutch Ministry of Defence ran into an IT network problem and ground traffic at Eindhoven Airport came to a complete stop for a while. While it was denied that the cause was in any bug in the software and not caused by any malicious intent, this points out how vulnerable critical infrastructure can be as regards technical failure.
Another major incident took place on June 3, 2024; an industry-wide price band technical issue at NYSE Group made Berkshire Hathaway's share price nosedive temporarily but alarmingly. The mistake had shown that the market capitalization of the company fell almost 100%, resulting in a two-hour halt in trading. Also on Decust 12, an interview between former United States President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk was delayed by more than 40 minutes because of a technical problem on X. The cause was blamed on a cyberattack, which frustrated the 765,000 listeners listening to the live stream of the said interview.
In fact, as early as this year, the extensive outage of Meta happened on March 5th. This outage blacked out access to Facebook and Instagram for several hours. Though confirmation along with an apology came from Meta, the reason was not known exactly, though it was suspected to be due to some sort of problem with the backend system. In February, the old wound of a so-called "fragile global communication network" again showed up when HGC Global Communications experienced huge hiccups in internet connectivity due to an attack on underwater cables in the Red Sea, affecting as much as 25% of its internet traffic, with a look to global reliance on robust digital infrastructure.
Incidents that have shown how deeply our daily life and services are intertwined with technology, and how strong contingency plans need to be, increasing the resilience of these systems. This, in general view, sets a viewpoint in the glitches of interconnectivity in our technological systems, their vulnerability, which calls for more interventions by AI and machine learning toward reliability and generally mitigating risks, as stated by Paul Semaan, Digital Transformation Expert at the UNDP.