Corporate Monopolies Blamed For Global IT Outage

Digital rights advocates responded to Friday's havoc-wreaking global technology outage by sounding the alarm on the Big Tech monopolies, which they argue should be broken up, Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams reported for Raw Story.

The Microsoft outage grounded commercial flights and caused serious disruptions to transportation, financial, and healthcare systems. I Photo: Smishra1 Wikimedia Commons

The outage—which is being attributed to a software update by the US-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—sparked worldwide chaos on Friday, causing so-called "blue screens of death" on computers using Microsoft Windows.

The outage grounded commercial flights and caused serious disruptions to transportation, financial, and healthcare systems.

"Today's massive global Microsoft outage is the result of a software monopoly that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global economy," George Rakis, executive director of the advocacy group NextGen Competition, said.

"For decades, Microsoft's pursuit of a vendor lock-in strategy has prevented the public and private sectors from diversifying their IT capabilities," he continued.

Emily Peterson-Cassin, who heads Demand Progress' corporate power program, said that "today's outage shows how one software issue stemming from only one or two companies can ground flights, take down hospital systems, stop 911 calls, and cut off access to the internet in one fell swoop."

Reliance on a few giant companies is a serious fundamental risk to Americans, she added.

Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson said that Friday's outage "should spur Microsoft and other IT firms to do more than simply administer a Band-Aid. The bigger problem is the supply chain itself for cloud computing and, by extension, cybersecurity services, which has left too many organizations vulnerable to a single point of failure."

Olson noted that European Union nations "are furthest ahead in addressing the market stranglehold that these so-called hyperscalers have with the new EU Data Act, which aims to lower the cost of switching between cloud providers and improve interoperability."