When the screens go blank

📣 You’re reading the weekend edition of The Early Line.

Apologies for the late arrival, this morning. There was an unusual amount of late-breaking stuff to get into this week’s edition.

A brief parish notice, too, to readers who didn’t get yesterday’s Early Line. One was sent, as normal, but it appears the Microsoft outage - about which I write, below - prevented or delayed delivery to many of you.

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Have a wonderful weekend, all!

🍸 Conspiracy, or cock-ups? Two almighty IT outages have dominated headlines over the last 48 hours: Microsoft gave a big chunk of the world a long weekend after taking down its email and Copilot AI services, among other things. And then the United States grounded all aircraft for five hours after another IT problem.

Given heightened tensions between Russia, Iran, and the Western world, government advice to start “prepping”, and a general air of worry about AI coming to mug humanity, it’s unsurprising some people will connect the dots in ways that creates a picture of impending doom.

What do we know for sure?

Well, planes are back in the air over the United States this morning after the longest nationwide "ground stop” of flights since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Authorities say there is no indication this event was caused by any form of cyberattack; however, the FAA has put it down “to extraordinary circumstances”, and nobody has been harmed.

It may be those “extraordinary circumstances” are simply ancient air traffic control systems being overwhelmed by data.

Meanwhile, Microsoft customers are able to read their email and use the Copilot AI systems again after a global outage that led to what, in Australia, was branded the “Microsoft long weekend”; such was the impact on productivity. There is, again, no evidence - and indeed denials - that the Microsoft outage was caused by a cyber attack.

The Register, a respected British tech publication, did note the company’s language on that shifted through the day yesterday - from “no indication this is the result of malicious activity” to, an hour and a half later, the less definitive “As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident.”

But, reading the New York Times coverage of the incident today, any of you who have worked in or around technology environments will spot apparently authentic signs of an entirely self-inflicted cock-up: “By Friday morning, the company had apologized at least twice. It said it determined that the problem stemmed from a recent upgrade to its network, which shut down some servers, and that the systems were steadily improving,” the title reports.

The lessons from the Microsoft outage, at least, may not be to buy yet more tinned goods. For those inside big tech companies, it’s a reminder that sometimes there’s nothing more damaging than a bad upgrade on a vital piece of software. For those who rely on those big companies, it’s a reminder that putting all your tech eggs in one basket is an increasingly risky strategy: when your screen goes blank, you’ll care more about not having an alternative than about the underlying cause.

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