MS Cloud outage with ‘blue screen of death’ causes disruptions worldwide

An outage of Microsoft's cloud services in the U.S. on Friday caused information technology (IT) disruptions around the world. Airplanes were grounded at airports in the U.S. and Germany, and stock exchanges and broadcasters in the U.K. and Australia experienced the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error. Domestically, some low-cost carriers (LCCs) experienced ticketing disruptions. Full recovery is expected to take weeks. The incident highlighted the potential dangers of the 'hyper-connected world' that IT has led to.

Cloud services allow you to store software and data in large data centers connected to the internet and access them whenever needed. Many companies use these services both domestically and abroad because they save money compared to maintaining their own systems. Microsoft's cloud service, which was the subject of the incident, ranks second with a global market share of 25 percent. Amazon is No. 1 with 31 percent, and Google is No. 3 with 11 percent, with U.S. big tech companies dominating 70 percent of the market.

The incident occurred when a U.S. cybersecurity firm responsible for securing Microsoft's cloud services conflicted with the company's Windows operating system during a software update. An estimated 8.5 million computers of businesses and individuals using Windows as a cloud service were affected. The damage is still growing, with tens of thousands of flights canceled or delayed around the world.

The incident is significant for Korea, one of the world's most IT-dependent countries. Similar to the failure of KakaoTalk and KakaoTaxi due to a fire at a data center in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province last year, and the disruption of civil services due to a local government computer network outage, this is another case of a highly concentrated IT system being compromised. It has once again been confirmed that even the world's best companies struggle to operate large, extremely complex IT systems reliably and without incident.

The incident should prompt governments and companies to reexamine the vulnerability of their IT and communication infrastructure due to overreliance and strengthen their backup systems to prepare for such events. The risk of similar incidents will increase as the generative AI industry, led by a few big tech companies in the U.S., becomes more sophisticated. It will be increasingly necessary to secure 'autonomy' that does not rely too much on overseas companies, especially specific ones.