A global outage affecting computers running Windows operating systems earlier this month took airlines around the world by surprise, leading to air traffic chaos, while other transportation systems, financial companies, and hospitals and clinics, as well as government departments worldwide were also affected.
In Taiwan, not even the nation’s largest hospital system — National Taiwan University Hospital — was spared.
As the saying goes: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” With this incident over, what lessons can be learned?
First, critical infrastructure is by no means limited to hardware. With ever-increasing digitization and automation of equipment and infrastructure, software is playing a far more important role. Peacetime has made people more complacent and less aware of these changes.
When departments in governments and private entities are busy compiling management inventories for their critical infrastructure, they cannot let such foundational software as operations systems slip through the cracks. At the same time, software crashes absolutely must be included in emergency response training to address problematic software, hardware or computer system breakdowns.
Second, no matter how technologically advanced or how great the level of digitization and automation is, governments and private enterprises must keep backups to be able to maintain the basic functional equipment society needs. Governments and companies need to integrate resilience into their mindset.
Last, Taiwan’s long-term development has tended to favor hardware production, but has somewhat neglected the software side of computers. As a result, the nation has put too high a degree of trust and reliance on Microsoft products and those of other major international manufacturers. Should another system outage occur, all the nation would be able to do is wait for the original manufacturer to implement a solution or fix. The nation cannot have a repeat of this problem when using generative artificial intelligence.
Huang Wei-ping works in public service and has a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US.
Translated by Tim Smith
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