Connected world

Global outage has lessons for the future

The outage caused by a flawed security update on Friday caused losses amounting to tens of billions of dollars, as it took down banks, hospitals, airlines, ports, stock exchanges, and several other businesses. But it could have been worse, and the silver lining to this cloud is that it will force organisations around the world to do better contingency planning for future disasters or cyber attacks. Indeed, insurance companies that will have to pick up big tabs will insist on a review of disaster-recovery practices. The outage was caused by a security update pushed out by cybersecurity