What we know about the global network outage impacting millions 04:47

Trevor Long's called in. Thankfully, we can call people, but you need to get in contact with me, drive at 2GB.com. Give me your number, and if you think you've got something that's worthwhile putting you to air for, we'll give you a call. Trev, what do we know?

Yeah, still very little, Chris, but I think we can pretty much firm up the CrowdStrike story and see them as the problem here. The interesting thing here for me is I suspect if we look at scale here, this could be the biggest outage we've ever seen globally because if you think about Optus was...

The biggest thing we'd ever seen in Australia. This is probably affecting as many, if not more people than Optus back then. And then when you put global problems in, this is definitely a massive event. For one vendor to have an issue, to bring down so much, is going to cause huge introspection for IT departments globally after this because...

There's no fail-safe. There's no backup. There's no redundancy to what is actually ironically meant to be the service, the software that stops you from having cyber issues. What is CrowdStrike? And so there's been – there's two competing theories on this. It's Azure – is it Azure? How do you say it? Azure. Azure is Microsoft's cloud system. Yeah.

And look, it may be that CrowdStrike uses that in a way, but if Azure was down, I suspect we would have heard that separately. But CrowdStrike is a platform that you subscribe to as a business that protects your business from cyber attack and that kind of cyber threat. And essentially...

Oh, sorry, I don't know if I've still got you, Chris. Yeah, you've got me. Essentially, computers in these organisations would have been set up to not work unless they had this level of protection in place. So essentially, with this failing, the computers have gone, hey, I don't think it's safe to turn on because I don't have that protection level on. So they've decided amongst themselves as computers to not work because they don't have protection if that protection has failed. What do they charge for this stuff?

I couldn't tell you, Chris, but it would be tens of thousands of dollars to the biggest companies. For argument's sake, because Channel 9's out, right? And 2GB's out, part of Channel 9, 9 Radio. Thousands of dollars a month. Thousands of dollars a month. And they would have in the contract, there would be uptime and downtime guarantees, and everyone's clocks would be ticking right now to make sure that if they go past, whether it's 99.9% or lower or whatever the number is in the contract,

depending on how much you pay that number is probably higher um for um you know essentially compensation but compensation after the fact doesn't help when you literally can't take uh payments right now and we have to be clear here cash is not king because you can walk into a business and if they're if it's got a price tag on it they're willing to take the cash great but if they've got a computer system they can't take the the payment they can't ring it up essentially

What I'm interested in, is there a competitor for CrowdStrike? Oh, there definitely is. I couldn't name any, but there are. So why does it feel like half the world is with this mob?

Um, I think it feels like that because it's so big. Um, you know, I think if we were to list all the companies that are not affected, I guess it might not feel like it's everyone. Do you know what I mean? Like it's, it's big because they're one of the biggest names in this space. They really are. You know, they spend huge money on, I think they're a sponsor of the formula one Mercedes team. Like they've got a lot of money. They're doing very well, but a failure like this, uh, really exposes them and will have impact on their bottom line going forward. Um,

Are there workarounds here for companies? Look, I think if I, a small IT department could probably essentially set the computers to bypass this level of security. But by doing that, you're opening and exposing yourself to, you know, a security risk. But,

I would think most companies, if they had that option, would take the risk now just to get back online. And that's what IT departments right now will be scrambling to do is bypass this system so that they can just get working again. And one thing, this wouldn't necessarily affect just sort of people's home computers as such, would it?

I don't think so. I'd be amazed if anyone's home computer was affected. If it was, it would probably be a small security company that's kind of in with CrowdStrike. You don't have CrowdStrike, do you? No. There'd be no one with less than 10 employees that would have CrowdStrike. This is an enterprise-level security system. Okay. Hey, Trev, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. We're learning as we go along. Yeah, and just keep ringing in. Please appreciate it. We're desperate for information. This is from