According info I heard, if the geomagnetic storm were to happen the world will go back to the ages before we had electricity. That's somehow similar to what can happen when we rely heavily on centralized tech, few or no alternatives to fall back on when trouble hits. I hope that changes soon.

I would like to clarify that the problem did not only occur with computers (servers) whose operating system is Windows, but also with servers running Linux platforms.

The source of the flaw was not Microsoft, it is a company that sells its cybersecurity services (CrowdStrike), a mistake made in an update, as happened in 2010 with MCafee in the hands of George Kurtz. It was not a Microsoft bug and did not affect all Windows computers.

A critical system “should never have automatic updates…” **Delmonting**. More than a human error, it is a software process error. The quality process failed and in the next few days we will know who literally had their heads cut off, because of the million dollar loss the company suffered on Friday in the stock market.

The fact that most companies are using AWS or Azure cloud is highly horrifying from a risk standpoint.  Even something as amazingly decentralized like Hive was still subjected to the CloudFlare outage a couple of years ago (the Hive blockchain wasn't affected but all the frontends were). 

Again, this comes back to my constant commentary about the dangers of public companies pushing for ever increasing profit every quarter. Shareholders don't care about risk generally. 

This is now making it feel like we’re going back in the days where there was no internet connection and all sorts of things
Well, that didn’t affect us here in Nigeria 

From what I hear, it was a pretty easy fix to get things back up and running. My servers shouldn't have been impacted because I declined to install crowdstrike when I had the chance. Many people are pointing to this opening the door to new attack vectors for potential nefarious actors.

It is very odd because we got through the entire day without seeing any impact from the outage. No banking issues, no challenges at the stores, nothing.

Things seem to be in a vicious circle between our demanding convenience and business looking to make profit providing it. 

> a test-run of a global hack.

I wouldn't bet against it, but gosh did it cause some problems. I was away in the woods camping most of the weekend, so I barely noticed and my Sunday flight left no problem!

> we are due a large "Carrington Event"

Tell your buddy not to put that kind of energy out into the world. Not in my lifetime please!

Nicely written. I totally agree with you a lot of problems centralization brings out weighs the cost of operating a decentralized system, no doubt a virus to one is a virus to all which is creepy as it is, decentralization is difficult is handle as more hands are involved and is a lot harder to control but still the benefits is uniqueness beyond our very expectations.

I do understand the other people's argument to an extent, because not being in control sucks really, not everyone got good training to improve their EQ, which should be the focus of this generation as well as growth all round because try to not unlearn and learn new things is the core cause of Centralization. Thanks for this fine read.

Centralization is never good. It's a huge point of failure and I don't exactly like it. It's better to have multiple different companies as not everything will go down. It reminds me of how people talk about Youtube. It's the largest place for videos by far. However, the smaller alternatives are good because the option exists. People just don't cater to the smaller stuff because it's hard for people to recognize it and they don't use it as much.

It was interesting yet scary to see what all was crashing. The party is mostly used as company security and boommmm...airports hospitals and other big stuff...i thought was the hack of haaks initially.

But indeed...most of all it was the eye opener to see how dependent we have made ourselves in everything. Worrying at least to say...

Good afternoon my brother. Greetings to you today.

I guess this also highlights the value of competition. Crowdstrike is supposedly one of the best security providers in the industry, and the large number of companies worldwide affected by this attests to it. If there are more competitive companies that offer these services, we might have seen less affected.

Seeing the workaround and how it can only be done manually is a nightmare for a lot of IT support.

It's so daunting when you realise just how many platforms were affected by this. I had a doctors appointment that day, and the whole thing ran old school - pen and paper for the notes, etc. It was bizarre. And scary. People were saying it was really a Cyber Attack, and it makes you wonder...

Thanks @tarazkp - hope you and yours are keeping well!

Annabelle 😊

It usually becomes a problem when we become too reliant on a particular source. 
I feel we rely on them too much
If things go wrong, we may be in trouble cos there may no be other means or it may be too late 

It's so incredible that so many companies are linked back to the same root vendor. I guess it was a good test of most companies' business continuity plans and I am just glad I didn't have a flight to catch on that day.

> what it actually does is highlight the dangers of centralization, monopolization, and widespread reliance on single-source systems

J's work was affected and when he told me about it this was pretty much exactly what I thought.  First thing I said when he was describing the scenario was "single point of failure" (stating the obvious because he thought the same too).

And by the same token can't deny the convenience either, as with your friend with the Apple products, I had all the kids on iPads/iPhones at one stage because it was stupidly, mind numbingly easy for me to do parental controls and location sharing and all of that and especially at the time of having multiple young children I just needed some things to be easy.

<sub>we're now in the process of trying to switch everyone to linux and to think more about this sort of thing, but it's HARD when all everyone wants is the easy thing that just works because there's an infinite amount of infinitely better things to think about/do and no one wants to think about the inconvenience of how catastrophic a single point of failure is because "that's not likely to happen"</sub>

Well that was quite a huge rabbit hole of a conversation, but something we definately need to consider and address.

The entire reason robbers rob banks is because everybodies money is there. It is an attractive Honey Pot, where the prize is lots of money. Banks are clearly a societal weakness, which has bred security solutions, but these solutions don't prevent bank robberies.

The same goes for centralization of software, it creates an attractive  honey pot, where the reward is not money, but fame and chaos. Which is seeming are more valuable to certain segments of society. 

We create security solutions, but they don't stop the hacks. This again is a recognizable societal weakness, which we are doing nothing about.

I think that we could easily convince society that diversification is needed for security, and if we could somehow promise interoperability, without an interdependence creating a Honey Pot, society would go along with it. 

But as you mention, centralization, like monopolization, makes people rich and powerful. And they are not afraid to use their wealth and power to destroy those who threaten their monopoly. 

I am afraid that unless we figure out how to decentralize MicroSoft highly distributed products, the world is doomed. 

This CrowdStrike was just a warning tremor, the real earth quake is coming.

Centralizing tech makes things easier but also increases the risk of big problems when things go wrong. Well said brother, hoping for decentration to take over one day 

>It is a large geomagnetic storm and over a hundred and fifty years ago, it set telegraph stations alight. Obviously at that time in history, there wasn't a lot of electronics about, but if it were to happen again, what happens to all that we rely on when those transformers fry in the radiation?

Probably then I will get the old battery-powered radio out of the attic and live for a while like my grandfathers did in the first half of the 20th century.

I think it was a pre-message to humanity about how it would be during a disaster or war. We are too dependant on them...