Last month large parts of Tonga were left without internet when an undersea cable was broken. It’s a scenario that is far more common than is understood It was the opening days of 2022, in the aftermath of a huge volcanic eruption, when Tonga went dark. The underwater eruption – 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima – sent tsunami waves across Tonga’s nearby archipelago and blanketed the island’s white coral sands in ash. The strength of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption severed internet connectivity with Tonga, causing a communication blackout at just the moment that a crisis was unfolding. Continue reading...

Countless theories for the cybersecurity firm’s outage are flying around, but whatever the reason, this sort of thing is likely to happen again • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here “Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question. We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50m. Continue reading...