Competition regulators have been on high alert for risks posed by too much market concentration, where a single point of failure can disrupt business worldwide. A cascading information technology outage that recently grounded hundreds of flights, upended health care and halted banking across the globe has been no exception.
The recent outage was triggered by a bug in a routine update to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s flagship software Falcon, resulting in a “blue screen of death” across thousands of enterprise computer systems running on Microsoft Windows. Even though CrowdStrike had issued a fix within hours, some companies took days to recover.
