Are we experiencing the consequences of what we expected at the turn of 1999 to 2000?
Anyone who lived through the turn of 1999 to 2000 heard a lot about the famous and fearsome “Millennium Bug”. Many countries and companies were afraid that at midnight a global failure could affect all systems and networks around the world; especially banks, energy, telephony and aviation sectors, could collapse. But why this fear? At that time, computer systems used only the last two digits to symbolize each year, to save memory space, that is, in the year 1999, only the number 99 was used to represent the year. Now, what would happen when the year was 2000? Would the computer store the information 00 in its memory, but would it understand that we were in the year 2000 or 1900? One of the first computer scientists to present this problem was Bob Bemer, a programmer who worked at IBM between 1950 and 1960 and who was one of the creators of the ASCII code. Bemer, back in the 70s, warned that the “Millennium Bug” could cause “the end of the world”.
You might be thinking, how could this be a big problem? If the computer “thinks” it’s 1900 instead of 2000, if we only see the last two digits it wouldn’t make much difference. But imagine that you start a phone call on December 31, 1999 at 11:59 p.m. and end the call on January 1, 1900. In theory, two things could happen: First, your phone bill could come with a positive balance of almost 99 years because we would have negative hours of use. Another possibility would be that all of that operator’s billing systems would crash because they couldn’t work with negative hours. Imagine this in a bank where you left some money in a savings account and the bank reversed your earnings, taking away the value because it worked with negative time. In computing, the measurement of time is used for many things within programs. A computer not knowing whether time is moving forward or backward could really cause a collapse in the computing systems.
But, those of you who lived through that time must remember that we didn’t have any major problems at the turn of the year, and that was because millions of dollars were spent around the world on preventive measures, such as software updates to support four digits, among other improvements and resolutions. With that, we thought that computing could not suffer for a “Bug” that would affect all systems globally.
However, on Friday, July 19, 2024, we saw what could have happened in practice if the “Millennium Bug” had actually occurred. The famous and iconic Windows blue screen could be seen on several screens around the world.
“Blue screen” at Newark Airport in the US — Photo: Bing Guan/Reuters
The global outage affected countless companies around the world, with the airline, financial and healthcare sectors being the most affected. We saw unusual scenes all over the world, such as IndiGo, which is considered one of the largest airlines in India, issuing boarding passes manually, filling them out by hand, to minimize losses and try to keep its operations running. In the United Kingdom and Australia, some of its main television networks were off the air. In Germany, elective surgeries were canceled at two hospitals, in addition to the stock, commodities and currency markets around the world being affected. To give you an idea, the least pessimistic initial estimate of financial losses for companies exceeds US$ 1 billion. All these events and losses show what would have been the “Year 2000 Bug”. Billionaire Elon Musk himself wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It’s the biggest IT outage of all time”.
Of course, the problem that occurred on that day is not the same as the one that occurred during the “Millennium Bug”, which involved problems with dates. However, the comparison is valid in terms of the global damage that we suffered. And although it may seem that Microsoft was the main culprit in this disaster, since only Windows servers were affected, in fact, it was one of the biggest victims. The company responsible has a name that is much less known to the general public, and is called “Crowdstrike”, owner of the software called “Falcon”, which caused this global outage after an update.
“Crowdstrike Company Logo”
So let’s start by understanding who “Crowdstrike” is. It is a North American cybersecurity company founded in 2012 in the state of Texas by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, both former employees of rival McAfee. The company focuses on creating tools to protect companies from cyberattacks. The company stood out in the market for using a technology that allows security flaws to be implemented and monitored continuously, without the constant supervision of a team of people. Everything is done remotely through the “cloud”, going against the grain of its rivals in this area, which, until then, carried out manual implementations on client servers. To give you an idea of how innovative this was at the time, its products attracted several clients, with its main ones being listed in the “Fortune 500”, a list produced and published annually by Fortune magazine, which ranks the 500 largest companies in the US, using each company’s revenue as a criterion. And if you follow American politics closely, you’ve heard of this company many times, as it was hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to investigate a data leak from the American party. Reported by the FBI in 2015, the leak was investigated by CrowdStrike in June 2016. The company concluded at the time that the systems were breached by two Russian hackers, reinforcing initial allegations by the FBI, which does not have the power to conduct such investigations. At the time, this leak exposed more than 20,000 emails from Democratic Party servers. The content exposed the private lives of politicians and party bureaucracy, including then-candidate Hillary. Because of this, CrowdStrike played a crucial role in the 2016 US presidential election, when then-Republican candidate Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Now that we know this company a little better, what actually caused this global problem? And why were Microsoft’s systems and services the most affected?
According to Crowdstrike’s own report, “The problem was triggered by an update to the dynamic protection engine called “Falcon,” which directly impacted machines running the Windows operating system. As of 7:09 a.m. on Friday (Brasília time), the company released a content configuration update “as part of the regular operations” of the Falcon platform, which is designed to protect endpoints (or endpoints, such as computers or phones) against cyber threats. The update was supposed to collect data on possible new threat techniques. The result, however, was different than expected.“. This is just an excerpt from the report explaining the problem. The document is much more extensive and technical, but, translated into simpler language, remember that when I introduced the company Crowdstrike, I said that “The company stood out in the market for having used a technology that allows security flaws to be implemented and monitored continuously, without the constant supervision of a team of people. Everything is done remotely through the cloud.” This remote and automatic update without human supervision, once installed, began to cause crashes on servers that had the Falcon tool with Windows installed. Other operating systems were not affected by this update. According to Microsoft, in total, “8.5 million devices with Windows were affected by the bug.” This number is less than 1% of all machines that use the Windows operating system, as it is worth remembering that Falcon is sold only to the corporate market. Therefore, personal use machines that have Windows installed were not directly affected.
Now you may be thinking, but Lilian, if only 1% of computers in the world were affected, how did we have all these problems on a global scale? I believe there are two main reasons why this happened. First, remember that most of Crowdstrike’s clients are listed on the “Fortune 500”? Microsoft itself is a client of theirs and uses the Falcon platform on the company’s own servers, including its cloud computing platform called Azure. This affected the operation of the company’s services, which stopped working. After all, Microsoft only has Windows servers, and most of them have the Falcon platform installed to ensure data security. The second reason is that although only 1% of Windows computers were affected, it was not really computers that suffered this “bug” but rather the servers of these large companies, which had the Falcon platform installed with the Windows operating system, or which used Microsoft services. Servers are responsible for storing all data globally, such as the system that checks in airlines or the servers used to broadcast content on a TV.
This makes me reflect that, since the emergence of the internet and increasingly cloud services and artificial intelligence, we have become accustomed to having access to information whenever we want and wherever we are. Movies, series, books, news are just a click or a tap away on our smartphones. However, this “global blackout” shows that the control we once had is just an illusion, because just a small “bug” in a company can take on global proportions. This event reminded me of a part of the song: “The adventures of Raul Seixas in the city of Thor”. I will leave it below for reflection:
“Civilization has become complicated
That became as fragile as a computer
What if a child finds out
Achilles’ heel
With just one toothpick, the engine stops”
Raul Seixas.
* This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the vehicle
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