Why is it that Microsoft computer systems displayed blue error screens at the end of last week—grounding flights and disrupting access to healthcare and banking services across the world—but users of Apple devices and bespoke in-house systems carried on uninterrupted?
The answer could lie in the European Union’s preference for tech regulation over innovation, which industry figures say blocked Microsoft from preventing the highly disruptive outage.
Continual pressure on technology companies to conform to EU edicts, centred typically on the Digital Services Act and increasingly censorious towards platform content, ends up restricting the ability of IT firms to deliver their primary objectives.
A faulty global software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—which, crucially, has privileged access to a key computer programme known as ‘the kernel’—resulted in millions of computers and servers failing to load. According to a Microsoft spokesman, this software was able to be installed—that is to say, this crash was able to take place—because of a 2009 agreement with the European Commission to “give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets.”
The Daily Telegraph reports that this agreement came after the European Commission “pursued Microsoft in the early 2000s over concerns that the company’s popular Windows software gave it an unfair advantage in other areas such as web browsers.”
Apple, on the other hand, blocked access to the kernel on its computers in 2020, citing the protection of security and reliability.
Ross Brown, a former Microsoft worker and advisor, said that the outage was “100% the fault of regulation based on ideology ([the belief that] open is better)” rather than on “understanding the technology architecture needed to ensure secure compute.” He added:
A lot of people are mad at CrowdStrike for a horrible lapse in testing but if you really are looking at root cause, aim your fire at Neelie Kroes [the former European Commission vice president for Digital Agenda] and their ‘policy over tech’ regulatory approach that led to Microsoft not being able to harden the kernel.
The European Commission owns the fault here.
Forbes notes that Apple’s freedom from stricter EU regulation on access to the kernel does not mean “the Mac is safe from all bugs, attacks or problems. But it escaped last Friday’s CrowdStrike issue.”
