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LONDON - Elements of the global IT outage on July 19, which grounded planes and hit services from banking to healthcare, have occurred before and until more contingencies are built into networks, and organisations put better back-up plans in place, it will happen again. pushed to its clients earlier that day, which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices around the world inoperable. of the highly competitive cyber-security market that provides such tools, leading some industry analysts to question whether control over such operationally critical software should remain in the hands of just a handful of companies. But the outage has also raised concerns among experts that many organisations are not well-prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an information technology system, or a piece of software within it, goes down. At the same time there are also more solvable digital disasters looming on the horizon, with perhaps the biggest global IT challenge since the Millennium Bug, the 2038 Problem, just under 14 years away – and, this time, the world is infinitely more dependent on computers. “It’s easy to jump at the idea that this is disastrous and therefore suggest there must be a more diverse market and, in an ideal world, that’s what we’d have,” said Professor Ciaran Martin, former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, part of the country's GCHQ intelligence agency. “We're actually good at managing the safety aspects of tech when it comes to cars, trains, planes, and machines. What we're bad at is then providing services,” he added. “Look at what happened to the London health system a few weeks ago – they were hacked, and that led to loads of cancelled operations, which is physically dangerous,” he said, referring to a recent ransomware incident that affected Britain’s National Health Service. Organisations need to look around their IT systems, Prof Martin said, and ensure there are enough fail-safes and redundancies in those systems to stay operational in the event of an outage. The July 19 outage happened amid a perfect storm, with both Microsoft and CrowdStrike owning huge shares of a market that relies on both of their products. Cyber-security professor Nigel Phair at Australia’s Monash University said: “I’m sure the regulators globally are looking at this. There is limited competition globally for operating systems, for example, and also for the large-scale cyber-security products like the ones CrowdStrike provides.” The outage hit airlines particularly hard, as many scrambled to check in and board passengers who relied on digital tickets to fly. Some travellers posted photos on social media of handwritten boarding cards provided by airline staff. Others were able to fly only if they had printed out their ticket. “I think it's very important for organisations of all shapes and sizes to really look at their risk management and look at an all-hazards approach,” Professor Phair said. The July 19 outage will not be the last time the world is reminded of its dependency on computers and IT products for basic services to function. In about 14 years' time, the world will be faced with a time-based computer issue similar to the Millennium Bug called the 2038 Problem. The Millennium Bug, or Y2K, happened because early computers saved expensive memory space by only counting the last two digits of the year, meaning many systems were unable to distinguish between the year 1900 and 2000, leading to critical errors. The cost to mitigate the problem in the years before 2000 ran up a global bill of hundreds of billions of dollars. The 2038 Problem, or Epochalypse, which begins at 0314GMT (11.14am, Singapore time) on Jan 19, 2038, is, in essence, the same problem.  Many computers count the passage of time by measuring the number of seconds since midnight on Jan 1, 1970, also known as the Epoch. Those seconds are stored as a finite sequence of zeroes and ones, or “bits”, but for many computers, the number of bits that can be stored reaches its maximum value in 2038. Prof Martin said: “We currently have a situation where there's huge global disruption, because we cannot cope administratively. “We can cope in terms of safety, but we can't cope in terms of service provision when key networks go down”. REUTERS