Update on Microsoft Outage and key implications

Responsible Tech, genetic diversity and ownership hold key to unfolding of 19th July MSFT-CRWD saga!!

👉 Couple of months back, probably in early 2024, we saw Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) coming up with CAS (complex adaptive system) approach to regulate AI. This was running parallel to the RAI (responsible AI) initiatives being run across technology providers (Microsoft, Google taking the lead here) and system integrators such as Accenture Arnab Chakraborty taking the forces head-on.

👉 Without going deeper into CAS, the approach is based on the premise that AI systems work in black-box fashion and unprecedented users/systems/use-cases can malfunction/differently function without much comprehensible logic (evidently visible from naked eye). 

❓ A key question here : Do only AI-systems work in black-box fashion in today's connected ecosystem? Should CAS approach be more holistic and beyond AI?

👉 Microsoft estimated 8.5Mn users were affected on July 19th. This was equally unprecedented and black-box since the update was a minor and regular one? This unprecedented affect to multiple users is contingent on genetic unity of systems being in use (in simple terms global interconnectedness). To avoid the global malfunctions like that happened on July 19th with Microsoft and CrowdStrike, genetic diversity is key!

❓ Another key question here : How do you maintain genetic diversity of systems when all updates are going at once and not in batches? Also what about higher redundancy in the system? As Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen says we need to go back and build redundancy in the system!!

👉 In the current situation, Microsoft could offload the entire risk on CrowdStrike and the affected organizations also offloaded the risks to the said organizations and third party IT vendors.

❓ Finally the question of ownership, who is liable for the losses business' and citizens faced and how would it affect CrowdStrike's future. Remember in 2010, such an issue though at a lower scale led to McAfee's sale to Intel Corporation