00:00of the cyber attack. Dr. Conor McKeown is a lecturer in digital media at the University
00:05of Stirling joining us on the program for more analysis on this. This is a massive disruption
00:11over 70 countries affected. What does it tell us about our vulnerability especially in the
00:16digital infrastructure we've just sort of come to rely on? Yeah I mean first of all it is worth
00:22saying that this is massive you know very likely a conservative estimate is somewhere in the realm
00:28of half a billion dollars has been lost over this. But in terms of how this what this tells us
00:34about
00:34vulnerability it is kind of complicated. It connects to what Nassim Taleb the wonderful
00:39mathematician and economist calls the fat tail that we end up with these very sparse you know
00:45select few companies that are providing important services for the whole of the world and it presents
00:52this illusion that we have 99.9% uptime we have this immediate fast consistent connection to our
00:59emails communication channels which is really good for the individual but whenever there is a moment
01:06like this one of these black swans that it can come about and cause huge global infrastructural changes
01:12like this. So yeah as we move towards things that are more consistent most of the time it leaves us
01:20vulnerable to these bigger shocks much less of the time. Right but looking at the scale of the problem
01:27as you mentioned right there's millions right of businesses government organizations the NHS over
01:31here for example in the UK who rely on Microsoft for for their daily operations. Are we too dependent
01:38now on a handful of tech giants because they've just created this massive concentration risk?
01:44It's a real trade-off you know it's before the big three were providing a lot of access to these
01:50important services a lot of companies would have had their own servers and their own IT departments
01:55that would deal with these issues in-house and it wasn't all rosy you know it made sense that we
02:02transitioned from that more local provision of services to more cloud providers because if your IT went down
02:10on a Friday and you rely on your own IT team to fix that you might not have email until
02:16Monday whereas
02:18now you know even with a massive scale problem like this we get service restored almost within 12-16 hours
02:27you know so it is more reliable overall but yeah it does leave us open to more systemic cultural shocks
02:36you know this way everyone is affected by the outage instead of just one or two businesses.
02:42So Microsoft says as far as they can tell right now there's no indication of a cyber attack but
02:47for the non-techies among us what would cause an outage on this scale is it just buggy codes and
02:54why is it they take so long to restore services? Yes it's actually really boring it's not a very sexy
03:02outage and essentially when you're dealing with servers like this you will every so often need
03:08to patch them you'll need to produce upgrades that make them less vulnerable to cyber attacks and things
03:14like that and when you upgrade them because you have to upgrade them in a sequential order sometimes
03:20one server might be out of sync with another and it can come down without you realizing then your
03:25traffic gets rerouted so basically your computers that are working have to deal with way way way more
03:31volume than they are used to and then that can result in uh downtime because there are so many
03:37problems stacking up that essentially the computers can't deal with it and they they go off then the
03:44big problem is as you start to turn your computers back on everyone starts emailing each other saying hey
03:50is your computer down is yours back up and that massive volume of increased use then keeps things down
03:56for a long time and so that's why you see this kind of coming back in drips and drabs of
04:02services sort
04:03of being restored and then sort of not being restored um but then there is an additional level of
04:09complication here which is that now there are more users than ever because a lot of the users are going
04:14to be bots and ai agents so there's more traffic than ever that we're dealing with today indeed it's
04:21it's a fascinating story but we'll have to leave it there for the time being dr economy kuna thank you
04:25thank you very much thanks so much
