Down Time

Yesterday afternoon's Microsoft Outlook outage was a weird milestone. With AI-enabled disruption rising, I had contemplated what might happen if they actually broke through financial firewalls but I hadn't really thought about the mega-platforms which connect everything. Outlook, gmail, cellphones, etc. The good news is we have redundant channels so we can communicate if one is offline BUT if we're not organized to communicate with a class of people (say, clients) it could create a lot of stress. As yesterday promised to do. 

I kept checking the main pages of the Times and the Journal to see when the outage would bubble up into the front-page event that it clearly should be, in my mind. Looking just now I see that it's there at the Journal, a little below all the continuing hoopla about Jensen Huang not keeping his dick in his pants.

Isolated and recoverable events like this are wake up calls that we need to continue to be serious about tightening thing up and understanding that we need to both allocate enough resources to control and insurance functions so that we don't end up getting screwed royally by forces bent on theft and destruction. But that really means people need to appreciate the necessity of those expenditures and not spend the money on other things. Control and risk management functions are invisible taxes that invisibly raise the cost of everything else, but gosh do we need them.