Technology’s grip on modern life is pushing us down a dimly lit path of digital land mines

The logo for CrowdStrike and a Spirit Airlines webpage with a Travel Advisory about a third Party Outage impacting their Reservation System are shown on a computer screen and mobile phone screen, in New York, Friday, July 19, 2024. — AP

SAN FRANCISCO: "Move fast and break things,” a high-tech mantra popularised 20 years ago by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was supposed to be a rallying cry for game-changing innovation. It now seems more like an elegy for a society perched on a digital foundation too fragile to withstand a defective software program that was supposed to help protect computers – not crash them.

The worldwide technology meltdown caused by a flawed update installed earlier this month on computers running on Microsoft's dominant Windows software by cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike was so serious that some affected businesses such as Delta Air Lines were still recovering from it days later.