Wednesday's confounding confluence of computer outages in the United States — at United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and The Wall Street Journal — delivered a jolting reminder about our deepening dependence on interconnected networks to get through each day.
For the most part, technology has worked smoothly while hatching innovations and conveniences that have made our lives easier and our jobs more productive. Computers, though, could bring more frequent headaches as they link together with billions of other electronic devices and household appliances— a phenomenon that has become known as the "Internet of things."
This technological daisy chain will increase the complexity of the systems and raise the risks of massive breakdowns, either through an inadvertent glitch or a malicious attack.
"The problem is humans can't keep up with all the technology they have created," said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner, an information technology research firm. "It's becoming unmanageable by the human brain. Our best hope may be that computers eventually will become smart enough to maintain themselves."
Technology already is controlling critical systems such as airline routes, electricity grids, financial markets, military weapons, commuter trains, street traffic lights and our lines of communications.
Now, computers are taking other aspects of our lives as we depend on smartphones to wake us up in the morning before an app turns on the coffee pot in the kitchen for a caffeine fix that can be enjoyed in a the comfort of a home kept at an ideal temperature by an Internet-connected thermostat designed to learn the occupant's preferences.
Within the next few years, we may even be unlocking our doors with high-tech watches after being chauffeured home in robotic cars.
Technology's relentless march demands better security measures to prevent hackers from breaking into system and more rigid programming standards to reduce the chances of crippling outages, said Lillian Ablon, a technology researcher for the Rand Corp, a policy think tank.
"Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start," she said. "We need to be a little smarter on how we are coding things."
The sequence of Wednesday's outages appears to have been a fluke. Sabotage isn't suspected, FBI Director James Comey said during an appearance before Congress.
But a domino effect may have contributed to The Wall Street Journal's outage. Comey believes the newspaper's website buckled after the New York Stock Exchange's problems caused alarmed investors looking for information to swamp the Journal's website.
The length of Wednesday's outages also is disconcerting, Gartner's Litan said.
It took the New York Stock Exchange more than three-and-half hours to resume trading, slowing Wall Street's usually furious pace. A "router issue" at United Airlines grounded its plane's for nearly two hours, leading to 800 flight delays and 60 cancellations.
"Everyone needs to assume technology is going to go down sometimes, but you should be resilient enough to quickly recover from the outage within a half hour, if not a few minutes," Litan said.
Wednesday's breakdowns were minor inconveniences compared to what might happen if better security measures aren't imposed to keep out intruders bent on wreaking havoc, said Jeff Williams, chief technology officer for Contrast Security, a security technology company.
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