Hong Kong tech experts have cautioned corporations against relying solely on one provider for cloud computing services to avoid a repeat of an IT outage on Friday that disrupted businesses around the world and threw the city’s air services into chaos.
The specialists weighed in on Saturday after Hong Kong authorities said they were “highly concerned” over the global computer glitch that disrupted Microsoft cloud computing services and affected Windows devices.
The outage was triggered by a software update from a third-party cybersecurity provider, CrowdStrike.
Francis Fong Po-kiu, the honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said companies should avoid overreliance on single platforms.
“Corporations should now consider using different cloud platforms for redundancy and load balancing purposes to avoid relying on one single cloud platform to perform all the functions such as programming, big data and artificial intelligence,” he said.
The outage on Friday affected airlines and airports across the world, including those in Germany, Australia, New Zealand and India. Some government operations as well as banking and healthcare systems were also affected.
Aviation analytics company Cirium said on Saturday there were 1,848 flight cancellations worldwide as of 8pm, representing 1.78 per cent of scheduled flights.
Hong Kong’s Airport Authority said on Friday that five airlines were affected by the outage, namely HK Express, Cebu Pacific, AirAsia, IndiGo and Scoot.
The city’s airport services slowed to a crawl when airlines were forced to resort to processing passengers manually, forcing customers to wait in long lines and causing delays to a dozen flights.
George Kurtz, CEO and president of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, apologised for the IT glitch that caused the global outage and said a software bug had created an issue within Microsoft’s operating system.
“The system was sent an update and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” he said.
IT expert Fong said he believed the glitch was caused by an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software called Falcon, which was designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.
“It is not uncommon sometimes the technicians just have not done software debugging thoroughly. After all, programmes are written by humans and humans will make mistakes,” he said.
Fong advised corporate users to diversify the use of cloud platforms and deploy multiple backup systems to minimise risk.
“Firms should also look for multiple backup plans to continue systemic operations in case of a major breakdown, to avoid a single point of failure,” he said.
Microsoft had said in a social media post it was investigating an issue affecting the ability of users to access various apps and services on its cloud-powered platform.
The Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre said on Saturday that the outage was not as serious in the city as in other places.
“It only impacted those running CrowdStrike Falcon sensor for Windows version 7.11 and above and [that] were online during the specified time frame from 12.09pm to 1.27pm on Friday,” the centre said, referring to local times.
“This means that organisations or users in Hong Kong who were not using the affected version or were offline during that period would not have been affected by the system crash vulnerability.”
The centre also advised organisations to enable offline access for critical applications and documents to ensure continuity of work, and back up important data.
It said organisations should have contingency plans in place, including alternative communication channels and backup systems.
IT industry veteran Joseph Leung Wai-fung, a lecturer at Polytechnic University’s school of professional education and executive development, said there was little end-users could do because the outage was a so-called supply chain-style incident.
“It depends on what kind of applications we are using and also the location of our data. If we put everything on cloud, once we face internet issues, then there’s nothing we can do,” he said.
“Therefore, it is advisable to have a local copy of your data and applications in your own hard drive.”
Additional reporting by Harvey Kong
