Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00For more, let's speak to Mathieu Noé, a tech analyst and entrepreneur.
00:04Hello to you, Mathieu.
00:06What was your reaction when you saw this developing story about this global outage?
00:11Thanks for having me.
00:15So the first reaction was, of course, a bit of fear.
00:17Is it a cyber attack?
00:20How massive is it going to be?
00:21How long is it going to take to fix?
00:24It looks like CrowdStrike's team were pretty fast in fixing the issue, and it looks like
00:28it's just an outage.
00:29So not more of a relief, but a pretty massive impact, very, very fast.
00:35Yeah, pretty fast to fix some of the underlying causes.
00:39But do you think we'll continue to see effects for the days to come?
00:42Well, definitely.
00:45It looks like the impacted machines are stuck in this restarting loop.
00:50So deploying the fix might take some time, and some people might have to just go and
00:56fix manually a Windows machine.
01:00One thing that is, I guess, pretty positive is that only Windows machines are impacted
01:04at this stage.
01:05And so, for example, Linux, which powers most of the Internet systems, is not impacted.
01:11And so that's why, I guess, we're seeing an impact in very specific sectors, are pretty
01:16heavily reliant on Windows machines, but not on every single corner of the web.
01:23And whether it's for Microsoft or for CrowdStrike, what do you think the fallout will be of this?
01:29Yeah, I guess.
01:31So for CrowdStrike, they were pretty fast, and they reacted quickly.
01:36They deployed this fix, but it's going to be hard to recover.
01:39I mean, it reminds me of this story, it was SolarWinds.
01:42This was a cyber attack, but they had a supply chain attack issue, and they deployed it,
01:47and it impacted many, many Windows-based computers.
01:51And they never truly recovered financially and even from a reputational standpoint.
01:56So it's going to be hard to fix for CrowdStrike.
01:59For Microsoft, I guess, they are a big company, they have several suppliers.
02:04They might implement some countermeasures and some heavy testing after that.
02:09But I don't see a huge impact for them.
02:12When you see an incident like this, is it an argument against a sort of global interconnectedness?
02:20Or is this just a necessary evil of that system?
02:24Yeah, I guess.
02:26So definitely for me, it's a necessary evil.
02:28I mean, we have big complex systems, accidents will happen.
02:33We need to be careful, we need to be aware that it will happen, and we need to put in
02:37place mitigation systems so that in that sort of cases, we can fix it in a matter of hours.
02:42I don't know if you realize, but it means that in the middle of the night for the US-based
02:46team, they were able to identify, isolate, and deploy a fix really quickly.
02:52And so once we have systems that connect billions of people, this is bound to happen.
02:58And so I don't see it as an argument against the connection and just not using these tools.
03:06Right.
03:07And a mitigation system like you're describing, is that incumbent on the private sector?
03:11Is that something that governments have to be responsible for?
03:15Well, I guess definitely the supplier of the software and the people that built the software
03:22should be responsible for the way it works.
03:24And so they should be able to deploy, fix this pretty quickly, revert to previous versions
03:29if some new update is faulty.
03:34Implying the government in that feels a bit difficult, given, again, the complexity of
03:38those systems.
03:39These are things that are updated sometimes many times per day.
03:45And so having some sort of watchdog analyzing the updates seems infeasible and would basically
03:51destroy all of the value here.
03:54But yeah, having some automated testing, making sure that software suppliers have revert mechanisms
04:01and can mitigate issues like this is definitely something that needs to be done.
04:08It participates to, I guess, the reputation of the company.
04:11And that's why, I guess, CrowdStrike will have a hard time convincing people that they're
04:17reliable now.
04:18Yeah.
04:19And the timing of this, of course, a busy travel period around the world.
04:23We're also one week away from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
04:27Do you think that'll have any effect on the games at all?
04:30Or the organization?
04:31Well, I guess it's, so we're seeing that in Paris yesterday, they started locking down
04:37the city and preparing for the opening ceremony.
04:39I guess we're early enough that it won't have a huge impact.
04:45People will be able to catch another flight.
04:47People will be able to make the trip.
04:50But indeed, the timing is pretty close.
04:52I guess we're not seeing that many public administrations being impacted, at this stage.
04:58So police, hospitals, local administrations are not impacted.
05:02The biggest impact is on transportation, obviously, with airlines and potentially payment terminals.
05:09But I don't see a huge impact on the Olympic Games, no.