Is Musk right? Is this the biggest IT flop of all time?Published at 14:07
Joe Tiddy
Cyber Correspondent
Tesla and X chief Elon Musk described today’s outage as “the biggest IT fail in history,” but is he right?
It is difficult to think of a more egregious incident in terms of its direct impact on people; no other has affected such a wide range of industries and societies.
The most recent major outage was when Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, went down in 2021. This affected billions of social media users and millions of businesses.
But the CrowdStrike outage is on a different level – the closest thing to this was in 2017, when two deliberate cyber attacks took hundreds of thousands of computers offline, causing major disruption to NHS services.
But then again, this incident could affect many more computers and businesses around the world, and the true test of whether Musk is right will be how long it takes to get back to normal, and how much the cleanup will cost.