A recent global technology outage grounded media houses, flights, knocked banks offline after a faulty software update disrupted companies and services around the world. In the earliest hours of the outages, some TV stations, including Sky News in the UK, stopped live news broadcast.
According to Microsoft, about 8.5 million estimated computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage. Experts said it could be the worst cyber event in history.
The glitch came from a security company called CrowdStrike, which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers. According to Microsoft, “we currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.”
Nigerian media analysts, however, believe there are lessons the nation’s media industry can learn from the development. In an interview with The Guardian, Executive Director of Media Rights Agenda MRA, Edetaen Ojo, said in today’s digital world, Nigeria, like many other countries, has become heavily dependent on technology for the provision and delivery of various services both by government and private companies.
However, quite often, he observed there are no plans or advance preparations to mitigate the negative impact of system failures, which are increasing frequent and some of which can have catastrophic consequences.
As a result, he said customers and recipients of various public services are therefore usually left helpless and frustrated when technology systems fail.
He added, “the recent global tech outage that disrupted operations of media houses airlines, banks, and other businesses has provided several important lessons, which Nigeria can learn from and could inform future planning to improve preparedness for such eventualities. For instance, the outage highlighted the need for robust backup systems and fall-back options.”
To him, “media houses, Federal and state governments in Nigeria as well as private companies must, therefore, ensure that they have multiple layers of backup systems to mitigate the negative impact of such outages.”
Speaking further, Edetaen insisted that regulatory authorities in the media space and other sectors of the economy overseeing different aspects of governance need to do a better job of performing their regulatory functions, including by ensuring that governments and private bodies under their regulatory authority comply scrupulously with relevant regulations and standards that could help mitigate the risks associated with such outages as well as ensuring that back-up systems and plans exist.
He suggested, “it is also important that media houses, governments and private companies regularly test, update and upgrade their systems as may be necessary and put in place disaster recovery plans and interim measures that can be relied upon when such situations arise. Regular testing can help to identify potential vulnerabilities and will also ensure that both the primary systems and back up options function as expected during any actual outage. Having a well-defined incident response plan, containing clear roles and responsibilities, appropriate communication protocols, and the steps to be taken for restoring services, is critical for effectively responding to such outages.”
He, however, observed the outage may have arisen during software updates, he said it is not inconceivable that cyber criminals and other malicious actors may also deliberately disrupt these technology systems.
To this end, he advised media houses, governments, private companies and other actors providing services to the public to invest in adopting appropriate cyber-security measures and strengthening such measures where they already exist as there is also a high probability that the outage may have exposed vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors.
In the area of customer service, he argued an important lesson from the global outage is the imperative of governments providing various public services as well as private companies adopting effective communication strategies and providing their customers and stakeholders clear information when such situations arise so that people can also take effective decisions to mitigate the negative impact of such situations on them or know when to make alternative plans or arrangements.
Saying there is need to keep everyone informed about the status of the outage, expected resolution times, and any interim measures being taken to help manage expectations and maintain public trust and confidence, he added there should be strategies in place to continue offering services and support, even if on a limited scale, to minimise the impact on customers.
