Without warning, the world woke up one morning last week to a technical failure that completely paralyzed many facilities, making everyone realize that we are once again facing a real dilemma and a global crisis, given that the situation has been repeated more than once, which strongly pushes towards the necessity of rethinking the path that humanity is taking towards development, and also the necessity of taking preventive measures against what could take us back to the Middle Ages in a moment.
What happened clearly revealed that we have become hostages to the virtual world that seems to control real reality, in light of the use of the Internet by about 5.35 billion people around the world, and governments and major companies have become heavily dependent on a group of interconnected technology companies since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, which explains why the world was turned upside down due to a problem in just one program, so what if the malfunction hit several other important programs?!
The crisis that Microsoft faced disrupted its services, which affected millions of users, as all sectors were affected, including the financial-banking sector, the vital energy sector, airports and transportation companies, e-commerce, security and safety companies, technology companies, email, social networking sites, and all services and businesses related to the Internet. Then all companies and governments that rely on Microsoft services were affected and incurred very large losses, not all of which were announced. A single technical outage affected even the largest countries in Europe, which faced major challenges due to that outage that even stopped the health, education, and media sectors.
But perhaps the greatest damage was witnessed by the United States of America, whose government and private companies rely heavily on Microsoft services. Is it reasonable for life in the United States to come to a standstill due to a technical failure? This is what actually happened. The “strongest” country has become like the rest of the countries, and has entered the emergency phase!
What matters to me in the whole issue is that, in the UAE, not even a single cyber attack has been recorded, as confirmed by the UAE Cyber Security Council, as there are no indications of hacking or cyber attacks, and the global technical glitch was dealt with professionally and efficiently, and all sectors recovered quickly and returned to work at their usual capacity and in an optimal manner. On the other hand, the sudden outage put the spotlight on CrowdStrike, which has a market value of $83 billion and has more than 20,000 subscribers around the world, including Amazon, and the crisis did not pass without losses.
In the first practical reaction to what happened, the value of CrowdStrike shares on the New York Stock Exchange deteriorated, falling by about 20%, as the value of one share fell from $343.1 to $275. This decline cost the company market losses amounting to $16.6 billion, which led to a decrease in the company’s value to $66.9 billion, while the shares of the American technology giant Microsoft – ranked second in the world in terms of market value – incurred losses estimated at about $76 billion. We can imagine that these huge losses were due to Microsoft’s one-day outage, but what if the outage continued for several days? Perhaps what happened is an alarm bell calling on the world to take action and search for practical mechanisms and solutions so that the crisis does not recur and the losses are more severe and greater.
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