A LOCAL airline boss last week posted on social media commenting on the recent Crowdstrike global outage, stating the need for airlines to be compensated for the downtime.

His frustration is understandable. The shockingly rookie problem was rectified within a few hours of it being discovered, but its effect spanned four to five days, leading to billions in global losses from unrealised revenue, reputational loss and recovery costs.

Perhaps what’s more interesting is the response by the Malaysian public, who pointed out the delays and downtimes in that airline, and their own difficulty in obtaining refunds, mostly in jest and with tongue-in-cheek incredulity.

Reading into that one layer deeper, it implies Malaysians are already used to said delays and downtimes from that airline – it is still surviving and nearing its pre-Covid performance, after all.

Maybe it’s part of Malaysian culture to be polite and tolerant.

We do see “system” downtimes pretty often. If you’ve been to a government agency, tried to renew a document or licence, paid a bill or even do some banking, you’d probably have met a “system down” response, sometimes personally by a customer service representative, and at others, with a scribbled note on a folded cardboard or an A4 paper taped to the front of  a desk.

Apart from the usual frown and an occasional loud grumble, we go on with our daily lives and re-attempt that transaction at hopefully a luckier time later that day or week.

But downtimes cost us. A lot.

A 2019 US study claims 22-25 minutes a day is spent per worker trying to work around some computer fault.

The IT Intelligence Consulting estimates a minimum of US$5,000 per minute of downtime for the typical American business.  Large businesses like banks lose US$16,700 per minute or one million per hour.

The Crowdstrike global outage cost Fortune 500 companies an estimated US$5.6 billion in direct losses. That figure does not include reputational and brand losses or companies outside that top bracket. This large figure will only grow with our increasing reliance on technology.

IT downtimes have many causes – connectivity, permissions, software glitches, human errors and hardware failures are some “innocent” causes that just happen occasionally, apart from malware, ransomware, viruses and other malicious reasons brought on by active perpetrators, or in cybersecurity parlance, “threat actors”.

With all these revolving issues, corporations spend a lot building a system, protecting it and backing it up. Although these cost a lot of effort, time and money, we are forced to maintain data integrity and ensure smooth flow of it from one process or system to another.

For example, an airline booking system likely connects its seating allocation, dynamic billing engine, invoicing, payment collection, baggage handling, ticketing, security clearance and finance records with one click.

Remove one part and the whole flow is disrupted. While backup systems are often in place, these too require connectivity and basic systems like desktops to be up.

Perhaps the lesson learnt from last week’s outage would be the need to have minimally tech-dependent backup systems, like files, paper and pen and rudimentary communication by land lines or walkie talkies.

These systems should be relatively much cheaper to set up, and for most purposes, would not require licensing, subscription and so on, but perhaps training and drills.

If we are already preparing for natural disasters, cyber-attacks and terrorism, it is not too far-fetched to train for complete system outages as well. Some financial organisations already incorporate this into their disaster recovery plans.

In an age of uncertainty and unprecedented technological advances, we need to ensure chasing progress does not completely stifle our ability to conduct our daily business functions. – July 25, 2024.

* Emmanuel Joseph firmly believes that Klang is the best place on Earth, and that motivated people can do far more good than any leader with motive.