IT meltdown shows how horrifyingly exposed we are to total economic collapse

Airlines around the world grounded flights after a tech outage disrupted systems
Airlines around the world grounded flights after a tech outage disrupted systems - REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain

The planes stopped flying, the trains stopped running and countless other services were disrupted around the world.

It remains to be seen how long the outage that hit global computer systems on Friday lasts. With any luck, it will be fixed quickly and the damage will be relatively minor.

And yet one point is surely clear: from the abolition of cash to the reliance on just-in-time supplies, we have become terrifyingly dependent on a tiny number of cloud-based computer systems.

We may be just one glitch away from a total economic collapse – and worst of all, for all the fashionable talk of “securonomics”, our political leaders are just making that worse.

Over the course of Friday, chaos rippled out across the world.

It appeared to start in Australia, but it quickly spread to the United States, with United, Delta and American Airlines all grounding flights. By mid-morning, it had moved on to Europe, with even Sky News briefly being taken off air.

Ironically, initial reports suggested that the problem was caused by an update from the security software specialist CrowdStrike. IT and security experts will no doubt spend weeks evaluating what went wrong and trying to figure out how their systems can be patched up to prevent anything on the same scale happening again.

And yet if you step back for a moment, surely there is a bigger point here. This global outage reveals that we are, on any single day, just one catastrophic glitch away from a complete economic collapse.

The real problem is this: we don’t have the resilience to cope with computer failures anymore.

Many people can’t switch to paying with cash if the contactless card readers don’t work for the simple reason that they don’t carry notes and coins around with them, the bank machines to get some cash from won’t work when the computers don’t run, and the shops and train stations don’t have the cash registers to collect our money.

A growing reliance on card payment systems has left businesses with no alternatives when they go down
A growing reliance on card payment systems has left businesses with no alternatives when they go down - @LukeRobertMason

Air traffic controllers can’t switch to plotting routes on maps because those skills have atrophied, and the planes are flown by computers much of the time anyway.

Factories don’t have back-up parts because they have switched to just-in-time supplies, and the supermarkets don’t have storerooms filled with basic goods to last for a week or two because they worked out a long time ago that it was more profitable to keep their operations as lean as possible.

The list goes on and on. Almost every kind of product and service has become dependent on a piece of software running on the cloud somewhere.

It hardly helps that the “cloud” itself is incredibly concentrated, with just three companies enjoying two-thirds of the market for cloud infrastructure services providers: Amazon, Microsoft and Google have 31pc, 25pc and 11pc of the market respectively. (China’s Alibaba is in fourth place, with just 4pc of the global market, but come to think of it we probably don’t want to rely completely on that company either).

If one of the big three goes down, everyone is impacted.

It might be easy, but we can’t blame companies for any of this. When they switch to just-in-time supplies or get rid of the cash registers, they are simply maximising profits for their shareholders. They are just doing their job. We can’t expect them to take responsibility for maintaining the stability of the entire system, nor would there be any way of rewarding them for doing so.

It is governments that should be fixing our critical dependence on a handful of fragile computer systems. Instead they are making it worse. The obsession with net zero, in particular, is making us more vulnerable than ever.

For all Rachel Reeves' talk of 'securonomics', Britain seems woefully unprepared for a massive global computer failure
For all Rachel Reeves' talk of 'securonomics', Britain seems woefully unprepared for a massive global computer failure - JONATHAN BRADY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Electric vehicles are packed with so much software that it is not clear whether they would still run if all the central cloud systems were down. By contrast, an old diesel van would always crank into life so long as it had some fuel in the tank, but we are set to ban the sale of new diesel vehicles in 2035.

Likewise, we will soon be relying entirely on the National Grid for all our heating and transportation, as well as keeping the lights switched on, but once again that is vulnerable to computer glitches, unlike an old-fashioned oil boiler that could keep on going whatever else might be happening in the world.

Will the wind turbines and solar farms that Ed Miliband is busily building still operate if there is a systems failure in the background? Your guess is as good as mine, but probably no-one has bothered to ask. Even the new range of digital phones won’t work when the web or the electricity goes down, unlike the old copper wire systems.

Add it all up and one point is clear: we should be working out ways of making the economy, and the basic preservation of healthcare, law and order and transportation, more resilient to computer systems failing. Instead, in dozens of different ways, we are making it less so.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves talks a lot about “securonomics”. Here is a simple idea for her: instead of wasting billions of pounds on green projects and on an “industrial strategy” that will inevitably leave us with a series of expensive white elephants, perhaps she should spend the money on preparing the country for a massive global computer failure and making sure that the back-up systems are in place for when that happens.

After Friday’s failures, the need for that is clearer than ever – and unlike all her other over-ambitious plans, it would actually make us more secure.