The current world wide outage has been reported as being caused by an update of the CrowdStrike Falcon software, that is designed to provide security. A white paper report on the CrowdStrike website states:

“Study participants reported that CrowdStrike Falcon has helped them minimize interruptions from unplanned outages that do not necessarily qualify as significant security incidents”.

From The Business Value of the CrowdStrike Falcon XDR Platform

A whitepaper report done by IDC, sponced by CrouwdStrike.

Dont accept what participants to a report say. Even the crowd can get it wrong.

The participants in the above report obviously are not a good indication of how things should be done.

Until this worldwide outage happened those that participated in the report were under the impression that the c Crowdstrike organisation new more about security and IT in general than they did. Hence how they restponded to a study. Then based on the white paper, I assume other IT people purchased and used CrowdStrike Falcon. Perhaps one of them was Microsoft. You would think that Microsoft would check out software before allowing it to be incorporated in to their operating system updates.

One of the biggest issues with all software is the concept of blackboxing.

That is were it is not known what a piece of software does. It is only known what goes in and what sould come out. Only those that wrote or understand that piece of software no what exactly what it does, under certain circumstances. Sometimes they don't even know that.

This is what appears to have happened with Microsoft using Crowdstrike Falcon.

Because of intellectual property law, generally, what a piece of software internally does, is a secret, that only the owners and creators of the software no. Unless some agreement is otherwise made or it is open source software.

It is possible that the deal between Crowdstrike and Microsoft was commercial in confidence, so most are not allow to no about it.

Is there a situation where software is so important that it should not be unable to be known what it does?

Perhaps in life threatening situations. Heathcare, mass transportation and the like?

Then what about the inability to start a personal computer, that has happened in the current outage, that may have information in it, if not known, could be life-threatening?

After the current situation blows over, I'll bet, none of those questions will be asked.

I indicated above that sometimes even the programers don't know or have thought of what the possible results of a program can do.

In artificial intelligence where computer software learns, and makes decisions based on what it learns, it becomes less possible of programmers to know what's likely to come out of a AI computer program, because the future of what it learns, is unknown.