Many companies are expected to report financial losses from the event, but it’s too early to tell what the final tally will be. Stocks fell Friday, with all three major indexes slipping by nearly 1 percent. Shares of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm at the middle of the meltdown, took a particularly big hit, falling by more than 11 percent and shaving off billions of dollars from the company’s value.
Yet experts said the incident isn’t likely to have obvious economic ripples, at least not yet — a day’s worth of grounded flights, canceled surgeries and inaccessible bank accounts aren’t enough to disrupt the country’s robust growth. But they cautioned that the outage, sparked by a botched software update by CrowdStrike, has exposed the precariousness of an economy built on a handful of interconnected technology systems.
“This is global capitalism at work, and it’s a fundamental economic effect of the internet we’ve built,” said Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “We have a very brittle system where companies are rewarded for maximum profitability. And how do you do that? With monopolization, with having no inefficiencies, with running lean — and the thing about that is that it’s really great as long as it works. But when it fails, it fails badly.”
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The shock to the global economy comes just as many industries are rebounding from years-long pandemic-related disruptions that snarled supply chains and led to widespread shortages and price increases.
This week’s outage puts a spotlight on “what we’re already worried about”: a world and global economy that becomes increasingly vulnerable to supply shocks, said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG.
“That makes for a world that’s more susceptible to bouts of inflation,” she added. “We saw it in the extreme — which we’ve adjusted to — in the pandemic.”
More immediately, the outage shut down payments systems around the country, with customers reporting cash-only purchases at grocery stores, gas stations and even zoos.
At Rojo Car Wash in Norwood, Mass., an employee said its credit card systems had been down all day Friday, resulting in lost revenue. “Cars see the ‘cash only’ sign and they just move past,” she said. “It’s been going like that all day.”
Still, although the incident raises a raft of concerns across the economy, experts say so far it seems unlikely to leave a discernible mark on the otherwise-strong economy, one marked by a robust job market and solid growth.
It won’t factor into the Federal Reserve’s decisions to cut interest rates or overhaul the economic platforms of GOP and Democratic candidates. But it underscored the looming risks from outside the financial world that can quickly ripple through major industries and small businesses alike.
“We’ve built a decentralized internet to withstand nuclear war, and yet what we weren’t prepared for is what we’re seeing now — a single point of failure felt around the world,” said Tyler Moore, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Tulsa. “We could be dealing with the effects of this for a long time, and the drag to the economy could be significant if that goes on.”
Speaking on “60 Minutes” in February, Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said the work of protecting and defending financial institutions is never finished. He has often cited a major cyberthreat as one of the things he worries about or that could suddenly undermine the Fed’s mission.
“The attackers are always improving their game and the defenders have to be improving their game all the time,” Powell said. “And you’ve got to keep investing and staying caught up or getting ahead. That’ll never stop. There will never be a moment when you can take a breath and think, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this.’”
The Fed has vast reach supervising and regulating America’s financial system, and on Friday morning, a spokesman said that “critical” Federal Reserve systems were operating normally and that the central bank was working along with “affected firms and other government agencies” to assess the situation.
The outage’s consequences seemed minimal among the Fed’s peers, too. Norway’s central bank said it had resolved some technical problems that affected liquidity operations, BNN Bloomberg reported, though the extent to which that was connected to the broader outages was unclear.
The New York Stock Exchange was also working normally, though the markets flashed red at the tail end of a week of losses.
Jeremy Kress, an expert on bank regulation at the University of Michigan, said the banking system appeared under control. But the sudden meltdown served as a reminder of the hazards of online failures. Kress pointed to a push among some regulators to increase the amount of capital that banks must have on hand for cyber outages.
Others in the industry said guarding the country’s financial system from cyberattacks and other tech outages has been a top priority in recent years. This week’s meltdown, they said, reinforces the need to prepare not just for nefarious attacks but also for run-of-the-mill tech updates and other protocols that can unwittingly ripple across the industry.
“For the last several years, the question has been, what do we do when we have a single point of failure?” said Jason Healey, a senior research scholar at Columbia University who focuses on cyber conflict studies. “If we all share the same software and one thing goes down, we all get affected. That’s what we’re seeing here, and we need to be prepared so these situations don’t drive us off a cliff.”
Speaking on CNBC on Friday morning, Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said there were no major issues with critical payments or banking services. But he said the country was “getting a taste” of what can happen when the financial sector and other major industries rely so heavily on a handful of cloud and tech companies. Chopra pointed to ransomware attacks over the past few months that affected health-care firms, auto dealers and others.
“This is the type of situation that can really create issues across the economy,” he said. “I’m pretty hopeful that what we will see today is inconvenience more than chaos. But of course we’re just getting a taste of it.”