The warp-speed digitalisation of our economies and societies has brought immense benefits. But it has also created huge vulnerabilities as today’s global outage demonstrated. For too long, governments and companies have acted on the assumption that cyber resilience is important but not urgent. The scale of this most recent digital failure — “the largest IT outage in history”, according to one security analyst — may help shift those considerations into the urgent bucket.

Rather than anything more sinister, the trigger for the cyber failure has been blamed on the most prosaic of reasons: a flawed software update. This came from the cyber security specialists CrowdStrike, causing so-called Blue Screens of Death initially to appear on computers in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The digital paralysis rapidly spread around the world causing massive disruption at banks, airports, hospitals, television stations and many other organisations. Groups as varied as South Korean gamers, US airline operators, British doctors and French Olympic Games organisers were among those affected.

CrowdStrike, which has 29,000 global customers, said it was actively working to solve the problem. But it ruled out any malicious intent from any outside party, which some affected customers had initially feared. “This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, posted on X, without a hint of contrition for the chaos caused.