IT outage live: Warnings mount that criminals are looking to exploit massive IT outage

Zoe Kleinman
Technology Editor, BBC News

It’s been about 36 hours since we first started seeing blue screens of death in alarming numbers. How is everyone doing?

Many systems are now back online, but this weekend, spare a thought for the IT departments around the world who probably haven’t been able to sleep yet.

Now that the chaos is subsiding, people are starting to ask big questions. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, one of the UK’s top computer scientists, compared what we’ve just been through to the pandemic this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Generally speaking, (these systems) operate at a very high level of quality,” he said. “But when things go wrong, and it’s like a pandemic, what lessons do we learn as individuals?”

According to him, the immediate priority is “resilience,” also known as having a Plan B.

“Maybe we should think about setting up multiple systems, instead of relying on one system now,” he said.

The reason this outage caused so much chaos is that millions of companies, services and platforms around the world run their technology infrastructure on the same products.

Over the past 24 hours, I’ve heard many people say they want to start carrying cash again and are considering getting more than one computer at home.

How long this legacy will last remains to be seen, but it certainly seems to have made the world think about the fragility of digital life.